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Marie-Laure
Ryan ISBN 0-8166-4686-4 Traces the
transformation of storytelling in the
digital age. Since its
inception, narratology has developed
primarily as an investigation of literary
narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists,
psychologists, and sociologists have
expanded the inquiry toward oral
storytelling, but narratology remains
primarily concerned with
language-supported stories. In Avatars of
Story, Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond
literary works to examine other media,
especially electronic narrative forms. By
grappling with semiotic media other than
language and technology other than print,
she reveals how story, a form of meaning
that transcends cultures and media,
achieves diversity by presenting itself
under multiple avatars. Ryan
begins by considering, among other texts,
a 1989 Cubs-Giants baseball broadcast, the
reality television show Survivor, and the
film The Truman Show. In all these texts,
she sees a narrative that organizes
meaning without benefit of hindsight,
anticipating the real-time dimension of
computer games. She then expands her
inquiry to new media. In a discussion
covering text-based interactive fiction
such as Spider and Web and Galatea,
hypertexts such as Califia and Patchwork
Girl, multimedia works such as Juvenate,
Web-based short narratives, and
Façade, a multimedia, AI-supported
project in interactive drama, she focuses
on how narrative meaning is affected by
the authoring software, such as the
Infocom parser, the Storyspace
hypertext-producing system, and the
programs Flash and Director. She also
examines arguments that have been brought
up against considering computer games such
as The Sims and EverQuest as a form of
narrative, and responds by outlining an
approach to computer games that reconciles
their imaginative and strategic dimension.
In doing so, Ryan distinguishes a wide
spectrum of narrative modes, such as
utilitarian, illustrative, indeterminate,
metaphorical, participatory, emergent, and
simulative. Ultimately,
Ryan stresses the difficulty of
reconciling narrativity with interactivity
and anticipates the time when media will
provide new ways to experience stories.
Marie-Laure
Ryan is an independent scholar and the
author of, most recently, Narrative as
Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic
Media. TABLE OF
CONTENTS Acknowledgments Part I:
Narrative in Old Media Part II:
Narrative in New Media Notes
Avatars of Story
(Electronic Mediations Series, volume
17)
University of Minnesota Press: 2006, 296 pp.,
$20.00, paper
Introduction
1: Narrative, Media and Modes
2: Drawing and Transgressing Fictional
Boundaries
3: Narrative in Fake and Real Reality
TV
4: Narrative in Real Time
5: Toward an Interactive Narratology
6: Interactive Fiction and Storyspace
Hypertext
7: Web-based and Multimedia Narratives
8: Computer Games as Narrative
9: Metaleptic Machines
Bibliography
Index