Michael Joyce Quotes

Michael Joyce is a professor of English at Vassar College, New York, US. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature.

Joyce's afternoon, a story, 1987, was among the first literary works of hypertext fiction to present itself as undeniably serious literature, and experimented with the short-story form in novel ways. It was created with the then-new Storyspace software, deployed the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism, along with some suspense and romance elements, in a story whose meaning could change dramatically depending on the path taken through its lexias on each reading. For instance, a hard-to-find series of lexias presented a new set of facts about the narrator's actions which affects the reader's judgment of the narrator. In The New York Times, Robert Coover called afternoon "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions", while The Toronto Globe and Mail said that it "is to the hypertext interactive novel what the Gutenberg bible is to publishing." His Twilight, A Symphony was his second hypertext novel.

Joyce's published books include War outside Ireland: a novel , Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics , Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture , Moral tales and meditations: technological parables and refractions and Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden . He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has been a Professor of English and Media Studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.

Joyce has collaborated with Los Angeles-based visual artist Alexandra Grant. The work Grant has made based on his texts has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. Wikipedia  

✵ 1945
Michael Joyce: 5   quotes 0   likes

Famous Michael Joyce Quotes

“I was just telling my students about first reading D. H. Lawrence and having that feeling: it is done, I need not do more or attempt to”

Interview with Michael Joyce in Pif (January 2000) http://www.pifmagazine.com/vol32/i_m_joyce.shtml
Context: I was just telling my students about first reading D. H. Lawrence and having that feeling: it is done, I need not do more or attempt to... I would have to say – and this is less hubris, I swear, than a humble recognition from what others say about reading my work – that I have a way of shaping the experience of the text so that it becomes like a maze of mirrors set at angles to each other, not a funhouse labyrinth exactly nor the mirror in mirror, but rather an angularity wherein the mirror mirrors the blue opening as well as the opposing surface so that surface and opening multiply and intertwine.

“I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.”

"afternoon, a story" (1990)

“There is no simple way to say this.”

"afternoon, a story" (1990)

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive.
An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Similar authors

Charles Bukowski photo
Charles Bukowski 555
American writer
Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher
Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert 158
American writer
William Saroyan photo
William Saroyan 190
American writer
Ray Bradbury photo
Ray Bradbury 401
American writer
William Faulkner photo
William Faulkner 214
American writer
Julio Cortázar photo
Julio Cortázar 29
Argentinian writer
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace 185
American fiction writer and essayist
Pearl S.  Buck photo
Pearl S. Buck 95
American writer
Peter Ustinov photo
Peter Ustinov 59
English actor, writer, and dramatist