Michael Joyce

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This article is about the hypertext author and scholar. For the North Carolina town councilman, see Michael A. Joyce. For the tennis player, see Michael Joyce (tennis player).

Michael Joyce (b. 1945) is a professor of English at Vassar College, NY, USA. He is also an important author and critic of electronic literature.

Joyce's afternoon: a story, 1987, was among the first literary hypertexts 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 dramatically affected the reader's judgment of him.) His Twilight, a symphony: a hyperfiction (1996) was a second hypertext story.

Joyce's books include War outside Ireland: a novel (1982), Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics (1995), Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture (2000), and Moral tales and meditations: technological parables and refractions (2001). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop.