Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory (review)

Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. vii + 285 pp. Hardcover $44.95, Paperback $19.95

Marie-Laure Ryan, who edits this volume, is one of the leading voices among scholars of literary theory dedicated to cyberspace and cybertexts. (Her other books include Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media [2000] and Possible Worlds: Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory [1991].) In this volume, Ryan assembles an impressive collection of scholars who are both dedicated to and cautious about computer technology and its effects on literature and literary theory. These essays are a wonderful introduction to the topic of cyberspace and literature for those of us just dipping our toes into these new waters; they are also a fascinating and sophisticated discussion for those already more expert in the field. And for those terrified to think about cyberspace at all, these essays offer some familiar literary tropes and topics (including discussions of race, gender and the body) while introducing theoretical areas unique to a medium based in mathematics and engineering.

This volume is arranged in three sections: Cybertext Theory, Cyberspace Identity, and Cybertext Criticism as Writing Experiment. Of these, perhaps Section 2, which deals with issues such as feminism and race, is most accessible to those of us just entering cyberspace. In this section, Barbara Page draws provocative parallels among women's writing, hypertexts and feminism using sample hypertexts by female authors. Thomas Foster makes similar forays into the issue of race and cyberspace by examining "The Souls of Cyber-Folk." Both of these essays begin on familiar theoretical ground that lets us get our bearings before transporting us into new textual territory. Each ends, however, covering very fresh turf—revisions of "traditional" Marvel comics by African-American writers who focus on cyborgs and their effect on racial representation in Foster's case, and multiply-authored revisions of cybertexts by new female writers in Page's case. Christopher J. Keep also begins with the familiar—with our experience of reading an actual, physical book (which Keep and his fellow cybercritics refer to as a "codex book," thus making those of us who deal with 21st-century "codex books" feel suddenly very ancient indeed). He jumps from a discussion of realist fiction into the realm of hypertexts to analyze what this new disembodied form of reading does to our experience as readers. Matthew Causey turns his attention to theater in virtual space. Causey is disturbed by the possibilities of virtual space and "postorganic performance" that could become simply a parade of images, thus displacing the immediacy and catharsis of "organic" theatrical performances. Can performance survive the displacement of physical bodies in the present moment by virtual images in a timeless cyberspace? Causey remains doubtful.

These middle essays in which most of us may recognize some of our own organic and human literary concerns might have made an easier entry into the very tough first essays that treat cybertext theory and plunge us into the realm of MUDs (multi-user dungeons [or computer games], also identified as multi-user domains) and MOOs (MUD, Object-oriented—or social meeting places in cyberspace). Creating literary texts in a new medium (such as hypertext) is not so threatening, but having interactive, multi-user games in which a scenario cannot be retrieved or repeated takes us much farther from what most of us think of as literature. Should a multi-user game, without a controlled and meaningful structure, and with no prospect of long-term duration be labeled literature? I must admit that my personal instinct is still to say probably not.

Espen Aarseth's essay in Section 1 on "ergodic" art, which includes hypertexts, adventure games, literature generators, MUDs and "other phenomena produced by some kind of cybernetic system," was fascinating but anxiety generating. While I can admit to engaging in computer games (sometimes compulsively), I do not view...