Michael Joyce (born 1945) is a retired professor of English at Vassar College, New York, US.
Joyce's afternoon, a story, 1987, was among the first literary works of hypertext fiction to present itself as undeniably serious literature, and experimented with the short-story form in novel ways.
It was created with the then-new Storyspace software, deployed the ambiguity and dubious narrator characteristic of high modernism, along with some suspense and romance elements, in a story whose meaning could change dramatically depending on the path taken through its lexias on each reading.
Joyce's published books include War outside Ireland: a novel (1982), Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics (1995), Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture (2000), Moral tales and meditations: technological parables and refractions (2001) and Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden (2015).
The work Grant has made based on his texts ("The Ladder Quartet" and the "Six Portals") has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles.