Through the Portal, and What Michael Joyce Found There

Reading the transmedial oeuvre of Michael Joyce, this essay traces shifts in literary culture—and, potentially, the literary imagination—in the digital era. Using John Cayley's theorizing on digital language art as a critical intertext, I view Joyce's ambivalent place in digital-literary studies through the figure of the portal, which serves equally in his writing as a mode of escape and confinement. Against more common reception narratives for Joyce, I suggest that his putative "hypertextuality" is incidental rather than integral to his poetics, serving as just another mode of seeing into, and moving through, moments of imaginative experience.