Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or a novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in this study, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals - getting lost in a good book, for example -we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, the text applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading. Ryan's analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution, such as hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role-playing games. As she considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, Ryan revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory - the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text's creation.
