Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World

When researchers in computer-mediated communications discuss digital textuality, they rarely venture beyond the now commonplace notion that computer textuality embodies contemporary post-structuralist theories. Written for students and faculty of contemporary literature and composition theories, this book is the first to move from general to specific considerations. Advancing from general considerations of how computers are changing literacy, Digital Fictions moves on to a specific consideration of how computers are altering one particular set of literature practices: reading and writing fiction.

Suffused through the sensibility of a creative writer, this book includes an historical overview of writing stories on computers. In addition, Sloane conducts interviews with the makers of hypertext fictions (including Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce, and Carolyn Guyer) and offers close reading of digital fictions. Making careful analyses of the meaning-making activities of both readers and writers of this emerging genre, this work is embedded in a perspective both feminist and semiotic. Digital Fictions explores and distinguishes among four distinct iterations of text-based digital fictions; text adventures, Carnegie Mellon University Oz Project, hypertext fictions, and MUDs. Ultimately, Sloane revises the rhetorical triangle and proposes a new rhetorical theory, one that attends to the materials, processes, and locations of stories told on-line.

SARAH SLOANE is Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, where she teaches courses on the Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture emphasis of the English major. She has published essays about virtual worlds, the web, computers and rhetoric, and feminist theories of technologies. She has graduate degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Carnegie Mellon University and Ohio State University. Interdisciplinary by training and nature, she grows increasingly interested in visual cultures, Science Studies, cultural tudies, and ethnographies of technical communities.