Through the Portal, and What Michael Joyce Found There

ABSTRACT:Reading the transmedial oeuvre of Michael Joyce, this essay traces shifts in literary culture—and, potentially, the literary imagination—in the digital era. Using John Cayley's theorizing on digital language art as a critical intertext, I view Joyce's ambivalent place in digital-literary studies through the figure of the portal, which serves equally in his writing as a mode of escape and confinement. Against more common reception narratives for Joyce, I suggest that his putative "hypertextuality" is incidental rather than integral to his poetics, serving as just another mode of seeing into, and moving through, moments of imaginative experience.