I was struck by the following paragraph by Margaret Atwood, which appeared recently in The Guardian:

“But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling - heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all - out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can image it, we’ll be able to do it.”

Grand Text auto is an interesting group blog about “interactive narrative, games, poetry, and art”… there appears to be a lot of interesting entries…I need to go back and look at this site closely….

I’ve selected a set of readings to inform my thinking about the area I call “endless hybrids”

So, here’s my list of readings in new media, game studies, and narratology that I’m going to examine. (Other items likely will be added as I come across them; this is a starting point, though I think it’s a fairly broad selection of books. Note that I’ve not included articles or web sites in this list. Those also will be added separately):

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck
George Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Marie-Laure Ryan, ed., Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling
Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
Gunnar Liestl, ed., Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan, ed., First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
Amy Scholder, Eric Zimmeran, Replay: Game Design and Game Culture
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative
Jay David Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media
Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print
Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film
Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method
Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative