2017—Marie-Laure Ryan
Born in Switzerland, and educated at the Universities of Geneva and Utah, Marie-Laure Ryan has worked as a software engineer and independent scholar for most of her career. Her publication record extends over thirty-five years. All told, she is the author of five monographs and more than 100 articles, the guest editor of special issues of Style and Poetics, and editor or co-editor of five volumes, including the landmark Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (co-edited with David Herman and Manfred Jahn).
In her book Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, which won the 1991 MLA prize for independent scholars, she expanded possible worlds theory to include, in each fictional world, the alternate possible worlds that characters create in their minds – the fictional world as they perceive it, as they predict or hope or fear it will be. No doubt the most indispensable contribution of this book is her principle of minimal departure, which stipulates that readers will imagine fictional worlds as being as close as possible to the actual world, apart from deviations from the actual that are expressly mandated by the text itself.
Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, the winner of the 2001 MLA prize for comparative literary studies, complements her earlier work on possible worlds, first, by analyzing our experiencing of fictional worlds as a continuum from immersion to interactivity, and second, by considering the effect of medium on our experiencing of fictional worlds. She revisited these topics in Narrative as Virtual Reality II (2015), updating her thinking by responding to developments in both interactive media and narrative theory since 2001. In Avatars of Story (2006) she returned to digital media, this time analyzing forms of storytelling developed for the new media. Her most recent book is Narrating Space, Spatializing Narrative (2016), co-authored with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu.
In addition to her work on print and digital narratives, Ryan has published four edited collections that explore narratives represented in a variety of media: Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (2004); Intermediality and Storytelling (coedited with Marina Grishakova, 2010); Storyworlds Across Media (co-edited with Jan-Noël Thon, 2014); and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (co-edited with Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson, also 2014). Ryan is currently working (with Alice Bell) on a new collection called Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology.
When we call Marie-Laure Ryan an “independent scholar,” we mean it only in a narrowly institutional sense; because in every other sense – in every sense that counts – she is not a go-it-alone independent, but a collaborator and facilitator, a builder of intellectual communities, a leader and role-model in our disciplines of narrative and media studies, and not least of all, a long-term friend and ally of this Society. She richly deserves the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
Brian McHale The Ohio State University President, ISSN