electropoetics

Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck review Marie Laure-Ryan's Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. They review the essential characteristics of hypertext to suggest more nuanced ways to understand realism in relation to virtual reality.

1999 e-literature award winner John Cayley writes about Saul Bass of classic film title fame. A precursor to language arts innovators Jenny Holzer, Richard Kostelanetz, and Cayley himself, Bass may now be recognized as a poet in his own 'write,' important for a new generation of designwriters creating "graphic bodies of language," moving words and signifying images, in digital environments.

Dave Ciccoricco returns to Stuart Moulthrop, considers Operation Enduring Freedom (2003) in light of Operation Desert Storm (1991), and consults the annals of World War II for a likely source of "Victory Garden," the title of Moulthrop's 1991 network fiction on the Gulf War.

Despite talk of endings and absences at Eastgate Systems, Dave Ciccoricco investigates continuities in the work of Michael Joyce and Mark Bernstein.

Rone Shavers argues that making readers aware of subjugation - the strategy of Harold Jaffe's False Positive - exposes little and hardly changes our relation to power.