OF VIRTUAL REALITY THROUGH THE PRISM OF NARRATIVE (MARIE-LAURE RYAN. NARRATIVE AS VIRTUAL REALITY: IMMERSION AND INTERACTIVITY IN LITERATURE AND ELECTRONIC MEDIA)

Marie-Laure Ryan is by origin a Swiss independent scholar, presently working in American environment, in Colorado. Her scope of interest is crossing the borders of individual disciplines; she is writing and editing theoretical works dealing with narrative theory, theory of possible worlds, game theory, cyberculture and digital literature. In her monograph Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Ryan is moving from the primary analysing of virtual reality as a philosophical concept through the presentation and explication of the poetics of immersion and interactivity to the projection of their synthesis as an ultimate aim for the perception of the work of art (concentrating mostly on literature and visual art). The theoretical parts are interwoven with seven interludes of hermeneutical interpretations, providing a direct exemplification of the presented theory. Narrative as Virtual Reality can be stimulating not only for the philosophical, art historical and cultural perspective on the piece of art or their interdisciplinary relations for theoreticians, scholars and scientists active in various humanistic and informational fields but can also function as a very inspiring source for the artists working with new media. The offered terminology and broad spectrum of concepts from diverse areas of art, science and technology can provide readers with a sufficiently stable basis for hermeneutical interpretation of the works from electronic environment.