瑪麗—勞爾•瑞安（Marie-Laure Ryan），美國獨立學者，著有《可能世界•人工智能•敘事理論》《作為虛擬現實的敘事》，與戴維•赫爾曼和曼弗瑞德•雅恩一道主編瞭《勞特利奇敘事理論百科全書》。在《敘事》《文體》《今日詩學》《符號學》《文學語義學學報》等知名文學理論期刊發錶論文一百餘篇。

Since its inception, narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with language-supported stories. In" Avatars of Story, "Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond literary works to examine other media, especially electronic narrative forms. By grappling with semiotic media other than language and technology other than print, she reveals how story, a form of meaning that transcends cultures and media, achieves diversity by presenting itself under multiple avatars. Ryan begins by considering, among other texts, a 1989 Cubs-Giants baseball broadcast, the reality television show "Survivor, " and the film "The Truman Show." In all these texts, she sees a narrative that organizes meaning without benefit of hindsight, anticipating the real-time dimension of computer games. She then expands her inquiry to new media. In a discussion covering text-based interactive fiction such as "Spider and Web "and "Galatea, "hypertexts such as "Califia "and "Patchwork Girl, " multimedia works such as "Juvenate, "Web-based short narratives, and "Facade, " a multimedia, AI-supported project in interactive drama, she focuses on how narrative meaning is affected by the authoring software, such as the Infocom parser, the Storyspace hypertext-producing system, and the programs Flash and Director. She also examines arguments that have been brought up against considering computer games such as "The Sims "and "EverQuest "as a form of narrative, and responds by outlining an approach to computer games that reconciles their imaginative and strategic dimension. In doing so, Ryan distinguishes a wide spectrum of narrative modes, such as utilitarian, illustrative, indeterminate, metaphorical, participatory, emergent, and simulative. Ultimately, Ryan stresses the difficulty of reconciling narrativity with interactivity and anticipates the time when media will provide new ways to experience stories. Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar and the author of, most recently, "Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media." ""