Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City and modernist literature

This article has two goals: one is to establish techniques for content analysis of a virtual environment, Liberty City, as part of a dynamic textual object, Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV). The second is to demonstrate these techniques with an analysis in the narrative of GTA IV as a very modernist, dystopian version of the American Dream. Further, the suitability of the video game as a medium for modernist themes and concerns as exemplified by the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot will be explored. Liberty City is an interactive city which a player can experience, rather than read about, answering many of the questions modernist writers posed to their frustrating, linear medium.