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New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Studies

Sarah Sloane

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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. In addition, latterday Luddites do not discriminate among particular forms of computer texts and the different practices of reading and writing each form engenders. 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 consideration 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.

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 consideration 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 fiction; 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.