digital futures of literature, theory, criticism, and the arts

david jhave johnston

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machine-writing

fictions present

first person

technocapitalism

writing (post)feminism

electropoetics

internet nation

critical ecologies

webarts

end construction

image + narrative

music/sound/noise

writing under constraint

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Florian Cramer first introduced the term Post-Digital in his 2012 ebr essay

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See John Cayley’s Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature published in ebr in 2017.

‐ ebr editor

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See John Cayley’s Bass Resonance

‐ Davin Heckman

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For other ebr essays by Cary Wolfe, click here.

‐ Dibs Roy

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See John Cayley’s ebr essay Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature, a version of which was reprinted in part for the Handbook of Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury 2018).

‐ ebr editors

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Kac offered a key early account of his take on holopoetry in ebr: http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr5/kac.htm (that’s the original appearance, and here also: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/uncontrollable)

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism and the Digital Text An earlier draft of this paper appearing as a contribution to the Materialities of Text conference organized by Sas Mays and Peter Thoburn for the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture in 2011. I am especially grateful for the generous feedback offered by Sas Mays, Bruce Thoburn, Gary Hall, and Richard Burt.

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See the ELD glossary entry for Photo-novel, which was inspired by Beatens’ research on the subject.

‐ Will Luers

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Lori Emerson introduces a gathering of nineteen electro-poetic essays. This gathering brings together both critics and creators of electronic poetry; as is usually the case in ebr, the ‘electronic’ does not exclude, but helps us to reconfigure and revalue poetic works in print as well as define what works in digital environments

‐ ebr editor

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Coover and Rettberg’s conversation anticipates two essay gatherings that ebr has under way for publication early in 2019, namely: Essayism (edited by Jason Childs and Joseph Tabbi) and Natural Media (Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Rasmussen).

‐ ebr Editor

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See Leonardo Flores‘ essay, published in ebr, where he recognizes “the need to account for the explosive growth and diversification of e-literary digital writing practices beyond what is practiced and studied by the ELO community.”

‐ ebr Editors

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Forthcoming gatherings include a reprint of Sean Braune’s
Phorontology (Punctum 2017) with serial commentary by Jhave Johnston; a gathering on Natural Media co-organized by ebr co-editors Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Rasmussen; and a November 2018 conversation, also in development at Bergen, on the work of Karl Knausgaard.

‐ ebr Editor

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Twitter seems an excellent example of imbalance and urgency conspiring to create a model of dysfunctional democracy. Many small utterances primed for reception by their popularity purify discourse by emphasizing the impact of the already known and/or already famous… the followed, the favorited, the re-tweeted flourish, while the neoliberal exile, abject, and subaltern are pushed further from the center.

‐ Davin E Heckman

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Boluk

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Borsuk

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Donato

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Fedorova

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Gorman

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Hatcher

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line Jhave

‐ Dibs

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E-Lit Futures 2012 Forum: Next in Line LeMieux

‐ Dibs

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In New Zealand, “Pakeha” has referred to New Zealanders of European descent and, more recently, any non-Maori New Zealander. Its origins and etymology are a matter of some dispute, but it typically does not carry the same kind of derogatory connotation as other comparable tags for “white” residents one finds in other bi-cultural contexts. It even appears on official documents collecting demographic information.

The Treaty of Waitangi is considered New Zealand’s founding document, not without controversy. The tribunal set up in 1975 was tasked with investigating historical breaches of the treaty – mainly land claims – and finding means of redressing them.

The 1981 Springbok protests were the result of the South African rugby team’s tour to New Zealand at the height of South Africa’s Apartheid policy. Most of the games went ahead, but there was nationwide condemnation and protest action. The event was a defining moment in the country’s history as it defined its postcolonial identity.

“Iwi” is often translated as “tribe,” which is accepted and acceptable in NZ; it also means “people” or “nation” in Maori. “Maoritanga” refers to Maori culture.

‐ Editors

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Moving “back and forth” between media is a plausible account of the origins of “electronic literature,” so called, and one that might be worked through (by creators and critics) going forward.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Tabbi’s essay can now be found here on ebr.

‐ Kent Aardse

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The goal of CELL is to provide interoperability across all the electronic literature databases. Effective, easy-to-use communication across all databases will ensure that any of our readers will have access to all reference materials for any particular work. You can find more information here.

‐ Kent Aardse

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View Callus’s essay, “Cover to Cover” in the ebr archive.

‐ Matt Moraghan

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Jhave Johnston’s lyric approach to temporary trajectories, perpetual calculus, and paradigm extinctions puts us on notice that we face headwinds of every kind drawn forward, as we are, by something beckoning at the limits of legibility.

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: Amaranth Borsuk suggests that the ELO award prizes and help members in their career paths. In 2014 the ELO established the Hayles and Coover Awards for criticism and creation, respectively, of electronic literature works. We established a Standing Committee on Credentialing chaired by Joe Tabbi and another, on Publications, chaired by Philippe Bootz. We believe both can contribute to career-building. […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: Loss Pequeño Glazier’s call for entries to E-Poetry 2015 opens with full caps: DEDICATED TO THE CONCEPT THAT THERE EXISTS ONE WORLDWIDE CONTEXT FOR DIGITAL LITERATURE. We endorse this worldwide context and point out that such a context makes urgent Natalia Fedorova’s call: to study and practice problems of translation, both of natural languages and of code. To this end, Electronic Literature Collection/3, 2015, has obtained the services of critics as curators in a number of languages and also recruited several translators to help with curation and production. […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: Samantha Gorman, teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, was struck by the generational gap between herself and her students and the much wider gap between her students and older work collected by ELO. […] Gorman analyzes a form of generational aesthetics—as did Florian Cramer in his keynote for the 2012 ELO Conference—that is connected with advertising and the commercial. In order to remain engaged in “developing bodies and new blood: both in terms of evolving approaches and in terms of numbers” she advises looking to our “brand” and looking beyond any idea of codified genre. […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: In almost complete contrast to Samantha Gorman, Donato would like us to look not toward those farther out on the technological-innovation curve, but those farther back, those on the other side of the digital divide. We cannot emphasize enough that we endorse this goal but must also confess that ELO has not found a realistic way to implement it. We do have a Standing Committee for Outreach on which we invite all interested members to serve. […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: If for Samantha Gorman ELO risks collapsing by virtue of irrelevance, and she would like us, therefore, to develop a distinctive contemporary “brand,” for Bishop we risk collapsing under our own weight and the undisciplined variety of work we support. He would like to see us disappear, assimilate, in regularized fashion back into the field from which he feels we came, namely literature. Apart from the fact that people in e-lit come from net.art, gaming, design, computer science and other fields in addition to literature, we note that the ELO’s efforts to become a regular part of MLA or AWP have encountered resistance. […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: We fully endorse Boluk’s view of what ELO does, investigating on every level investments that accompany toolsets and language, and in fact language as toolset. We also find ELO vested in learning how to read the nonhuman history of inscriptions in emerging genres and platforms. We believe that using the term “digital” with humanities, as at DHSI, or “electronic” with literature, in an MLA context, in fact permits just such an investigation. “Humanities” and “literature” themselves must change, and they are after all terms of recent vintage compared to very old concepts of song, making, ritual, and the like. […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: Stephanie Boluk places us “amidst [a] tempestuous and contestatory media ecology.” The terms “digital” and “electronic” begin to seem to her, and others, outdated, co-opted, or past their prime in terms of rhetorical usefulness. Ian Hatcher finds them too constraining. They should not be used to label technology-aware writing practices if they establish a Procrustean category (folder) as opposed to being one descriptor among others (tag). […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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Luesebrink & Strickland: Patrick LeMieux is concerned that we should promote and honor research into important theoretical issues associated with language and computation, namely “multitemporal moments and multiscalar movements,” because we are positioned to see “what not only outpaces human consciousness but time and space itself.” What is the linguistic analogue of “something that is resolved conceptually but is unresolvable in practice”—could this not be a poetry generator for instance? […]

See the full commentary

‐ Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink

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The Cognitive Fictions cluster includes essays by D. Fox Harrell, John Bruni, Stephen Burn, James J. Pulizzi, Joseph McElroy, Kiki Benzon, and Eric Dean Rasmussen.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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Characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, having lived through the American Revolution, recall changes in musical form in the 1770s; parallel changes in pop music of the Sixties are implied, and one of Pynchon’s characters cites Plato as the source of the idea that alterations in music precede and perhaps precipitate political change: “‘Tis ever the sign of Revolutionary times, that Street-Airs become Hymns, and Roist’ring-Songs Anthems,– just as Plato fear’d,– hast heard the Negroe Musick, the flatted Fifths, the vocal portamenti– ’tis there sings your Revolution.

Characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, having lived through the American Revolution, recall changes in musical form in the 1770s; parallel changes in pop music of the Sixties are implied, and one of Pynchon’s characters cites Plato as the source of the idea that alterations in music precede and perhaps precipitate political change: “‘Tis ever the sign of Revolutionary times, that Street-Airs become Hymns, and Roist’ring-Songs Anthems,– just as Plato fear’d,– hast heard the Negroe Musick, the flatted Fifths, the vocal portamenti– ’tis there sings your Revolution. These late ten American Years were but Slaughter of this sort and that. Now begins the true Inversion of the World” (264).

‐ Ben Underwood

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Larry McCaffery reflects on his late eighties essay “White Light” in ebr’s Music Sound Noise thread.

Larry McCaffery reflects on his late eighties essay “White Light” in ebr’s Music Sound Noise thread.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Parry’s formulation – “literary event” – aptly describes Pax, but it’s also an oxymoron, insofar as a literary text isn’t an event that one experiences, but an object that one interprets. This term points to the fate of “the literary in the age of the digital,” as Parry puts it. In digital environments, the emphasis on the event means that the literary becomes an object of experience rather than a interpretable text.

Parry’s formulation – “literary event” – aptly describes Pax, but it’s also an oxymoron, insofar as a literary text isn’t an event that one experiences, but an object that one interprets. This term points to the fate of “the literary in the age of the digital,” as Parry puts it. In digital environments, the emphasis on the event means that the literary becomes an object of experience rather than a interpretable text.

‐ Ben Underwood

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The reference to an “Airborne Toxic Event” is an allusion to Don DeLillo‘s White Noise

‐ Ben Underwood

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Linus may be right, but sometimes all the eyeballs look the wrong way. Part of what makes networks so interesting is the ways in which they break, reroute, and disperse information (and not just link and gather it). So much digital literature, and its criticism, addresses the points at which the network breaks: transient texts, unreproducible experiences, and art at the margins. I’m confident your work will revel in these challenges, combating ‘digital Maoism’ and the seductive power of networks that shunt us only to safe, well-traveled places.

‐ Ed Finn

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Stefans’ ebr essay “Privileging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing” is likewise concerned with the issue of text and meaning and the reduced terms with which these are both approached in electronic writing.

‐ Lori Emerson

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While this review concerns itself mostly with Stefans’ bookbound reflections on digital poetry, a range of cutting-edge ebr-authors such as John Cayley and John Zuern have written on Stefans’ digital poetry.

‐ Lori Emerson

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For more on the Critical Code Studies Conference, co-organized by Mark Marino, see the series of essays and discussions posted under ebr‘s First Person thread.

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John Cayley presents a substantial critique of Baldwin based on this essay’s initial presentation at conferences. Cayley’s critique is posed in a response to Joseph Tabbi’s essay “On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature.”

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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Ted Pelton’s essay “Great Excavations” is an in-depth look at Creeley’s collaborative work.

Ted Pelton’s essay “Great Excavations” is an in-depth look at Creeley’s collaborative work.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Joe Amato draws connections between Louis Zukofsky and novelist Richard Powers.

Joe Amato draws connections between Louis Zukofsky and novelist Richard Powers.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Michael Boyden’s essay “The Riddling Effect” contextualizes these three texts that Mathews refers to, all of which are now available on ebr: “The Dialect of the Tribe,” “Fearful Symmetries,” and “The Case of the Persevering Maltese.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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See Paul Harris’s essay “Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms: A Re-viewing of Tlooth, Cigarettes, and The Journalist“ in which he rediscovers the senior American member of Oulipo on the occasion of three reprints from The Dalkey Archive Press.

See Paul Harris’s essay “Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms: A Re-viewing of Tlooth, Cigarettes, and The Journalist“ in which he rediscovers the senior American member of Oulipo on the occasion of three reprints from The Dalkey Archive Press.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In addition to Michael Boyden’s interview with Harry Mathews, ebr has republished a number of Mathews’ short stories (“The Dialect of the Tribe” and the constrain-based “Mister Smathers“) and essays (“Fearful Symmetries” and “Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese“).

‐ Lori Emerson

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See the 1999/2000 collection of ebr essays Writing Under Constraint which explore how the use of numerical and other non-verbal constraints stimulate literary expression.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Eugene Thacker, likewise, suggests that Kac’s work has little to do with biological life or the life sciences but is more about the practice of art as an emerging medium. Read the full review
here.

Eugene Thacker, likewise, suggests that Kac’s work has little to do with biological life or the life sciences but is more about the practice of art as an emerging medium. Read the full review
here.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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McMurray’s own integration of systems theory into ecocriticism in Environmental Rennaisance is discussed in a review by Stephen Docherty.

McMurray’s own integration of systems theory into ecocriticism in Environmental Rennaisance is discussed in a review by Stephen Docherty.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Brian Kim Stefans, in his November 2005 essay responding to _First Person_, “The Pixel/The Line,” suggests that moving words may be hard to square with (lower-case) literary art generally. Stefans cites reasons having to do not with textuality and authority, but meaning.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Wolfe’s critical engagement with music goes back at least to 2001, when he co-edited an ebr thread,

Music/Sound/Noise.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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Neil Badmington has also reviewed Wolfe’s book for ebr.

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This example is particularly striking for its dual subversion: not only is the rogue image burned on top of some unsuspecting tourist’s memory of this sign, but because both images consist of text, this is also a political statement in the linguistic sense (as well as – in this case – a language-driven work of digital art that participates in a nuanced, multivalent act of ‘tagging’).

‐ Dave Ciccoricco

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Laura Dassow Walls’ call for ‘deliberative’ reading practices echo her earlier critique of E.O. Wilson’s notion of ‘consilience’. Here Walls argues, Wilson’s attempt to forge an alliance between the sciences and the humanities fails because “Wilson writes as a scientist, imbuing every page with the sublime authority that allows him to mangle history without penalty and dismiss his opponents without argument.”

‐ Stefanie Boese

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Bruce Clarke’s review of Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism similarly challenges the Neo Darwinists’ supposed scientific objectivity. Their project can only fail to see beyond the category of the human precisely because the circularity of their argument presupposes that which it seeks to analyze: “the only scientific observers of ‘human nature’ available are themselves human beings.”

‐ Stefanie Boese

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Eduardo Kac writes for ebr on the attractions of the hologram as a malleable, fluid, and elastic medium for poetic expression.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Stephanie Strickland’s ebr essay “Dali Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia” discusses Kac’s “Time Capsule” and how, without being bound to any machine, Kac is readable by a machine, wearing an electronic anklet that monitors him as much as any prisoner.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Marjorie Perloff delves deeper in the materiality of concrete poetry in her ebr essay “Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics“; she claims that for de Campos, the typographic constellation – in this case the morphing of the letters that compose pluvial into its cognate fluvial – has eliminated all traces of the poet’s ego so as to make a linguistic-visual construct.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Davis Schneiderman intervenes in the innovation vs. crowd-pleasing debate via Jonathan Franzen’s attack on William Gaddis and Ben Marcus’s subsequent response.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Pynchon is the subject of discussion in two 2007/8 reviews:

Beginning with a discussion of paranoia’s centrality to critical work on Pynchon, Timothy Melley’s review of John Farrell’s Paranoia and Modernity considers the historical importance of paranoia to the Western mind.

In his 2006 ebr essay, McHale returns to Pynchon and to postmodernism to reflect on earlier approaches to the movement

Pynchon is the subject of discussion in two 2007/8 reviews:

Beginning with a discussion of paranoia’s centrality to critical work on Pynchon, Timothy Melley’s review of John Farrell’s Paranoia and Modernity considers the historical importance of paranoia to the Western mind.

In his 2006 ebr essay, McHale returns to Pynchon and to postmodernism to reflect on earlier approaches to the movement as he questions “What Was Postmodernism.”

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A decade ago, Laura Dassow Walls already critiqued the colonization of the humanities by one marginal branch of the sciences and specifically E.O. Wilson’s tendency to reduce complex issues to evolutionary history. Her essay “Consilience Revisited” is available here.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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ebr has an essay by Marta Werner on the material look of Dickinson’s late papers; and a review of Jerome McGann, the leading advocate of a textual criticism, is scheduled for early 2006.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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One of the earlier proponents of critical software studies was Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001, p. 48.

‐ Jan Van Looy

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For some examples of Perl Poetry, see http://www.perlmonks.org

‐ Jan Van Looy

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For an excellent review of My Mother Was a Computer, go here.

‐ Jan Van Looy

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And if all this is discussed, what then? The problem of field delimitation, the tendency to elaborate complexity without constraint, and an incipient sclerosis in contemporary critical studies is discussed by Andrew McMurray in his introduction to Critical Ecologies circa 2006.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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In “Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework,” Rita Raley analyzes the poetics of Mez’s “neologistic net.wurked language…
m[ez]ang.elle,” which incorporates “made-up code language as a mode of artistic composition and everyday communication.”

‐ Ryan Brooks

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This essay is a general introduction to a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. As each week is published on ebr, it will be indexed here.

Week 1:
Introduction
Discussion

Week 2:
Introduction
Discussion

Week 3:

Introduction
Discussion

‐ Ryan Brooks

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The claim seems to be that the worm reproduces the heteronormativity of tennis marketing, no matter the gender, orientation, or motive of the coder or clicker (a qualification that is teased out later in the discussion). The critical point seems to be that the code is an INSTANCE of and/or (not sure which) a FIGURE for heteronormativity. But don’t both ways to read this critical point make the actual code irrelevant? If this is heteronormative interpellation at work, why do you need to understand code to understand that?

The claim seems to be that the worm reproduces the heteronormativity of tennis marketing, no matter the gender, orientation, or motive of the coder or clicker (a qualification that is teased out later in the discussion). The critical point seems to be that the code is an INSTANCE of and/or (not sure which) a FIGURE for heteronormativity. But don’t both ways to read this critical point make the actual code irrelevant? If this is heteronormative interpellation at work, why do you need to understand code to understand that? (The coder and clicker were both interpellated in advance – why do you need code to get that?) If the point is that the structure of the code somehow RESEMBLES interpellation, then couldn’t any kind of “wormy moment,” with any kind of ideological content, stand in? Later in the discussion, Marino answers the second critique by basically making the first point (code as symptomatic of its social context), but in that case, the first critique still applies.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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Mark C. Marino’s talk at the 2009 Digital Arts Conference will be published in a forthcoming edition of Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Mark C. Marino’s talk at the 2009 Digital Arts Conference will be published in a forthcoming edition of Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. As each week is published on ebr, it will be indexed here.
Week 1:
Introduction by Mark Marino
Discussion

This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion. As each week is published on ebr, it will be indexed here.
Week 1:
Introduction by Mark Marino
Discussion

‐ Ryan Brooks

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Linda Brigham, in her review of My Mother, argues that the problem with complexity, “even organized complexity,” is that it tends to obscure any narrative “through-line.” For this, Brigham recommends the study of networks and network types that “trace the emergence of story from random bits of narrative.”

Linda Brigham, in her review of My Mother, argues that the problem with complexity, “even organized complexity,” is that it tends to obscure any narrative “through-line.” For this, Brigham recommends the study of networks and network types that “trace the emergence of story from random bits of narrative.”

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Elsewhere on ebr Lisa Nakamura interviews Haraway, Mathew Fuller reviews The Cyborg Handbook, and Salvatore P offers an interpretation of a Joseph McElroy cyborg.

Elsewhere on ebr Lisa Nakamura interviews Haraway, Mathew Fuller reviews The Cyborg Handbook, and Salvatore P offers an interpretation of a Joseph McElroy cyborg.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Curtis White contributed to the second issue of ebr.

Curtis White contributed to the second issue of ebr.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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The literary critical term that covers the phenomenon of one character trusting another more than the reader knows he or she should is dramatic irony. This term doesn’t apply cleanly in Deikto stories, however, given that a character’s trustworthiness (or another attribute) is assigned a numeric value. Unlike traditional conceptions of dramatic irony in which the reader knows more than the character, here the apparatus of the story itself bears the knowledge that the character lacks, but the reader does not have such insight.

The literary critical term that covers the phenomenon of one character trusting another more than the reader knows he or she should is dramatic irony. This term doesn’t apply cleanly in Deikto stories, however, given that a character’s trustworthiness (or another attribute) is assigned a numeric value. Unlike traditional conceptions of dramatic irony in which the reader knows more than the character, here the apparatus of the story itself bears the knowledge that the character lacks, but the reader does not have such insight.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Linda Brigham has also written a review of Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman.

Linda Brigham has also written a review of Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman.

‐ Lori Emerson

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geniwate, Kembrew McLeod and Benjamin Robertson all address issues of copyright, writing of the potential for copyleft to disrupt capital flows.

geniwate, Kembrew McLeod and Benjamin Robertson all address issues of copyright, writing of the potential for copyleft to disrupt capital flows.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Andrew McMurry also questions the complexification of literary studies in his general introduction to the Critical Ecologies thread, circa 2006.

Andrew McMurry also questions the complexification of literary studies in his general introduction to the Critical Ecologies thread, circa 2006.

‐ Lori Emerson

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William Gibson in Neuromancer (1985), by naming his interplanetary ship the Marcus Garvey, formalized the connection between an established Rastafarian and an emerging Cyberpunk culture, helping to mainstream technological and musical countercultures.

William Gibson in Neuromancer (1985), by naming his interplanetary ship the Marcus Garvey, formalized the connection between an established Rastafarian and an emerging Cyberpunk culture, helping to mainstream technological and musical countercultures.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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It was McKenzie Wark, who brought the dub transformation into cultural criticism (if not the cultural mainstream). As Wark wrote, with numerous variations, in Virtual Geographies (1994): “We no longer have roots, we have aerials..”

It was McKenzie Wark, who brought the dub transformation into cultural criticism (if not the cultural mainstream). As Wark wrote, with numerous variations, in Virtual Geographies (1994): “We no longer have roots, we have aerials..”

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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For an earlier consideration of the state of Pynchon studies, also appearing in ebr, see Joseph Tabbi’s “The Pyndustry in Warwick.”

‐ Ryan Brooks

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The quantitative/qualitative division evokes Marx’s analysis of use vs. exchange value in the first volume of Capital. Although Van Looy doesn’t go quite this far, his analysis of D&D suggests that playing the game is good training for participation in a capitalist marketplace.

The quantitative/qualitative division evokes Marx’s analysis of use vs. exchange value in the first volume of Capital. Although Van Looy doesn’t go quite this far, his analysis of D&D suggests that playing the game is good training for participation in a capitalist marketplace.

‐ Ben Underwood

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However, on the other hand, the fact that readers depend on multiple interfaces for reading the same text points, I think, to the ways in which the reading interface is actually of utmost importance.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Of the three examples of library objects mentioned here, only functions really qualify. Commands and types of data objects are not part of the library of a programming language, they are constitutive of the language itself. (Except for commands like “read” and “write”, which do call procedures that belong to the library). As for functions, some are original to the program, others are part of the library.

‐ Marie-Laure Ryan

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While the distinction between accumulative and modular library became clear to me as I read the text, I think its characterization here is rather confusing. “Accumulative” is defined as “emphasizing the interdependence of component elements.” This suggest the idea of a system. But it becomes clear later that accumulative libraries are more like unstructured lists than like systems. As for modular libraries, they can be added to, so they do have an accumulative capability. It seems to me that the distinction boils down to encoding: in accumulative libraries objects are collected as they are; in modular libraries they are encoded in a uniform way. If this is the case, only digital libraries can be modular. But in a library of physical books the cataloging system creates an internal organization: does it mean that the library is modular?

‐ Marie-Laure Ryan

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What would the “general data file” contain? Would it be something like an ASCII file that contains just the words and that can be searched? What about texts with images: would they need two types of data files ? But since images cannot be searched, the image file would not be very useful.

‐ Marie-Laure Ryan

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I once had a few of my books in Softbook, the first (and now abandoned) e-reader. No reader has yet arrived that has completely satisfied my desire for the book experience. At the same time, as a designer of electronic literature, the ability to link, with sound, color and motion, would be a necessary part of the delivery. The forthcoming Apple iPad might be the platform to do for reading what iTunes did for music (and books on tape, for that matter). If the New York Times can format for it, and all user control (font size, for instance, or orientation), this could be the breakthrough. If not the iPad, then something very like it, I would guess.

‐ Rob Swigart

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Bernstein continues on with this characteristic political critique in his exploration of speed as a morally-coded concept in his ebr essay “Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren’t You the Kind that Tells: My Sentimental Journey through Future Shock and Present Static Electricity. Version 19.84.”

Bernstein continues on with this characteristic political critique in his exploration of speed as a morally-coded concept in his ebr essay “Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren’t You the Kind that Tells: My Sentimental Journey through Future Shock and Present Static Electricity. Version 19.84.“

‐ Lori Emerson

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Michael McDonough’s ebr review of Brian Kim Stefans’ Before Starting Over clearly positions Stefans as a post-language poet who extends Bernstein’s anti-absorptive poetics more deeply into the digital realm.

Michael McDonough’s ebr review of Brian Kim Stefans’ Before Starting Over clearly positions Stefans as a post-language poet who extends Bernstein’s anti-absorptive poetics more deeply into the digital realm.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In his review of the same collection, John Zuern points to the serious omission of the editors’ own contributions to electronic literature. The review is available here.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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In her review of the Electronic Literature Collection, Adalaide Morris insists that the collection is, emphatically, a collection of “literature” in electronic media, a genre in development since the first-generation hypertext poetry and fiction of the mid-1980s.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In fact, it would be entirely logical to suggest that elit might even resuscitate reading, given the fact that it inhabits the places most likely to accommodate reading in a digital culture: screens. As Michael Joyce said memorably, “hypertext is the word’s revenge on TV” (1995, 47).

‐ Dave Ciccoricco

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Though this suggestion may set up a misleading comparison (not to mention that moving from ‘if’ – ‘potential’ – to ‘when’ oversteps the mark). Clearly, video games are gaining what we can understand as literary sophistication, in particular those described by Juul as “coherent world” games. But there’s no reason to think that this sort of literary game is on course to subsume the non-literary variety (for lack of a better binary pair). After all, there will always be books and video games that occupy opposite sides of a literary continuum, so it is difficult to see what is actually being compared here.

Perhaps more importantly though, video games have been and will be a boost to digital lit and narrative. But they are not something the field should or needs to rely on for a piggyback ride to popularity and exposure. Such a suggestion would take some edge of the sharp insights made elsewhere in the article with regard to mainstreaming.

‐ Dave Ciccoricco

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A provocative question. I would add to it also the question: “Who are we in relation to it?” Otherwise put, after the cyborg and the posthuman, is there a way of thinking subjectivity that is commensurate with e-lit? Is e-lit intelligible to us? If not, how could it be? Mark Poster briefly and obliquely considers such questions in Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham: Duke UP, 2006).

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Not only white male authors are wary about television’s impact on the technologizing of the word: In her first public address after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, reluctant feminist icon Doris Lessing deplored the mass media’s effects on literary production.

Not only white male authors are wary about television’s impact on the technologizing of the word: In her first public address after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, reluctant feminist icon Doris Lessing deplored the mass media’s effects on literary production. Promising new authors, particularly attractive young women, are marketed as celebrities and “can’t write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing.” Like DeLillo and Pynchon, Lessing believes that writers must resist much of televisual culture, not least because the exposure and public access it demands intrudes upon and disrupts the solitary “imaginative space” of literary production. “If a writer cannot find this space,” Lessing warned in her Nobel Lecture, “then poems and stories may be stillborn.”

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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Karen, we could say, effectively transforms the signs by which we come to know people into objects of perception rather than objects of understanding. According to Walter Benn Michaels, this transformation of the intentional, and thus meaningful, sign into the unintentional, and thus meaningless, mark constitutes the ur-logic of postmodern thought, which is distinguished by its irrational privileging of affective experience over cognitive beliefs.

Karen, we could say, effectively transforms the signs by which we come to know people into objects of perception rather than objects of understanding. According to Walter Benn Michaels, this transformation of the intentional, and thus meaningful, sign into the unintentional, and thus meaningless, mark constitutes the ur-logic of postmodern thought, which is distinguished by its irrational privileging of affective experience over cognitive beliefs. In The Shape of the Signifier), Michaels suggests that through Bill Gray’s figuring of writing as “bits of human tissue sticking to the page” (Mao II 28), DeLillo not only depicts but effectively endorses a “disarticulation of writing from representation” (175). Is it possible, however, that both Fitzpatrick and Michaels err in identifying Don DeLillo’s ideological commitments with those of his fictional creations?

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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For a rigorous critique of Toni Morrison’s literary postmodernism, see Madhu Dubey’s indespensible Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (U of Chicago Press, 2003). Dubey challenges the conservatism of Morrison’s southern folk aesthetic on the grounds that it naively valorizes a premodern, black, southern, and female, oral tradition as an imaginary solution to problems associated with the alienating experience of modernization – particularly urbanization and print-based literacy.

For a rigorous critique of Toni Morrison’s literary postmodernism, see Madhu Dubey’s indespensible Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (U of Chicago Press, 2003). Dubey challenges the conservatism of Morrison’s southern folk aesthetic on the grounds that it naively valorizes a premodern, black, southern, and female, oral tradition as an imaginary solution to problems associated with the alienating experience of modernization – particularly urbanization and print-based literacy. For Dubey, Morrison regularly succumbs to a “nostalgia for the literal” (178), and her desire for abolishing mediation makes her anything but a technological progressive. Rather, in a “postmodern romance of the residual” magic and orality provide the means for forging an imaginary black community that, in reality, remains riven with conflict due to the socioeconomic contradictions inherent to late capitalism.

Amy Elias’ ebr review of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism was published as part of the Senseless Resistances gathering.

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society.

Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society. As a professor of literature, I’m concerned about the not insubstantial number of incurious college students who resist using library databases to conduct research and who must be coerced, through specific assignments that require them to check out and read books, journals, and magazines, into exploring what’s available in the stacks at the university library.

‐ Eric Dean Rasmussen

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Joseph McElroy writes, “Water . . . is one of our properties, passing through, as if we were one of its. And if we are one of its properties – for it helps us live – where can that take us?” McElroy extends a number of water narratives, strategies, and reflections toward just such a revitalized commons in water.

‐ Aron Pease

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RTMark’s “hacktivism” and corporate parody represent one attempt to -if not abolish – at least sabotage the corporate naturalization of property rights.

‐ Aron Pease

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Elsewhere in this thread, Chris Crawford describes a storytelling language with syntax similar to that Elrod ascribes to Tetris – although not elegant, such sentences can effectively convey narrative.

Elsewhere in this thread, Chris Crawford describes a storytelling language with syntax similar to that Elrod ascribes to Tetris – although not elegant, such sentences can effectively convey narrative.

‐ Ben Underwood

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See also Michael Boyden’s interview with Mathews in which he discusses the issue of translation, referring to this essay and two other related pieces available on ebr: the story “Dialect of the Tribe” and “Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese.”

See also Michael Boyden’s interview with Mathews in which he discusses the issue of translation, referring to this essay and two other related pieces available on ebr: the story “Dialect of the Tribe” and “Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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Perloff reviews another theorist of a different kind of ‘difficult whole,’ Franco Moretti and his Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez, in ebr 1998.

Perloff reviews another theorist of a different kind of ‘difficult whole,’ Franco Moretti and his Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez, in ebr 1998.

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Conte, who like McHale has published books on both novelistic and poetic genres, is reviewed by Joseph Tabbi in ebr 2004.

Conte, who like McHale has published books on both novelistic and poetic genres, is reviewed by Joseph Tabbi in ebr 2004.

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The generative aesthetic in fiction and poetry, and at least one example of generative writing by Paul Braffort, can be found in the ebr 1999/2000 special on Writing Under Constraint.

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“Play” that more and more comes to resemble work: in a riposte to an article published in ebr‘s Second Person volume, Jan Van Looy argues that gaming is just the thing for preparing a generation of future office workers.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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In “Cognition Against Narrative: Six Essays on Contemporary Cognitive Fiction,” Joseph Tabbi argues that narrativity does not comfortably inhabit electronic environs.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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In a recent response to Walter Benn Michaels’ “Neoliberal Aesthetics,” Michael Clune ponders the political consequences of the gap between actual economies and the “economic fictions” described in American Literature and the Free Market.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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In a general introduction to Critical Ecologies circa 2006, thread editor Andrew McMurray offers a similar reversal, when he asks readers of this journal whether they fit the profile of the ‘new physiocrat,’ the present embodiment of positivism in critical writing.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Carolyn Merchant’s treatment of Gaia in Earthcare was discussed by Stacy Alaimo in the initial 1997 Critical Ecologies.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Clarke discusses media theory, a distinct but related facet of systems theory, in his review of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

‐ Lori Emerson

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For more on My Life with Master, see Paul Czege’s discussion of protagonism, which he sees as an engine for story creation.

For more on My Life with Master, see Paul Czege’s discussion of protagonism, which he sees as an engine for story creation.

‐ Jan Van Looy

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Costikyan’s contention that some games aren’t enhanced by the addition of story relies on the difference between play and narrative. In other words games don’t necessarily require stories.

Costikyan’s contention that some games aren’t enhanced by the addition of story relies on the difference between play and narrative. In other words games don’t necessarily require stories. Walter Benn Michaels, in The Shape of the Signifier, argues that games also don’t rely on the subject position of the players, or on their beliefs: “In chess, for example, the person playing white doesn’t think the person playing black is mistaken; the conflict between them is not about who is right but about who will win: what matters in a game is not what you believe to be true but which side you’re on” (32). Michaels’s claim becomes thorny, however, in a discussion of role-playing games in which the subject positions of the players and characters are, at least in part, the object of the game, and the game itself consists of what the players believe.

‐ Ben Underwood

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See Golumbia’s “Metadiversity: On the Unavailability of Alternatives to Information”.

See Golumbia’s “Metadiversity: On the Unavailability of Alternatives to Information”.

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The bulk and density of Jackson’s text suggests that it be considered under the auspices Tom LeClair establishes in The Art of Excess and his ebr essay, “False Pretenses, Parasiates, and Monsters”.

The bulk and density of Jackson’s text suggests that it be considered under the auspices Tom LeClair establishes in The Art of Excess and his ebr essay, “False Pretenses, Parasiates, and Monsters”.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Lennon’s panoramic review-essay might have been more lucid — despite its obvious commitment to theoretical divagation as right and proper method — so part of the problem here might be less Glass’s casual invocation of Bourdieu (and I’m tired of hearing Bourdieu’s name myself) than (in this case) understandable, if unproductive, misreading (of irony etc). Perhaps, then, a cooler rhetoric would incite more productive polemic? But Lennon’s response to Glass is at any rate unambiguous on most counts. I only wish the discussion would start in what seems to be emerging as the vital precincts of debate. It might be just me, but I get the distinct sense that the issue becomes incendiary to the extent that scholarship is seen as bridging the distance to creative writing only by enforcing a certain disciplinarity (or system), and that writers (who often seek or posit liberation from the institution, or system) and scholars (whose very livelihood is overdetermined by the institution, or system) feel compelled to take sides accordingly. But perhaps it’s not about quietisms of one sort of another — it (the rhetorical stakes, I mean) might be more about our on-the-job experiences, and how we square these with our (sure, historically-rooted) aspirations. (I know I hope someday to make a lot of money as a writer and leave the teaching to my betters. He sd.) To his credit, Lennon suggests as much whenever he ventures into the potentially ad hominem domain of calling out the tenured as such. But there might be a way to do this with less heat, and I should know, having failed on more than one occasion, right here in ebr. (Disclaimer: I’ve read McGurl’s book and have posted my own squib on same at Goodreads, but I haven’t yet read Golumbia’s book.)

‐ Joe Amato

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There is perhaps nothing in either R/romanticism or neo-Romanticism that requires identification with critical naivete and ignorance, here, or with necessarily less theoretically sophisticated approaches than the alternatives to be proposed in what follows. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that R/romanticism is in fact the best name for that “masocritical” insurgency, undertaken from within the Erinnerung of Euro-Atlantic modernity, which, in its preservation of a figure of strong and even incommensurable “local” difference, stands the best chance of contacting the opposition traced by this essay’s invocations of “refutation,” “resistance in the present,” and the pragmatically unaddressable “incommensurability of the problems we face.” Indeed, one might say that in context of a certain natural (and not at all illegitimate) tendency to statism, in the profoundly bureaucratic institution of the academy, R/romantic anticapitalism is, as the work of Michael Löwy suggests, too easily dismissed—and that it is as good a vehicle as any for the specific critical package described in item #2 (“Internationalism and Politics”), below: not “post-colonial theory” as a perhaps finally inter-statist accommodation of (any new) global order (in the new national transnationalisms and hemispherizations, the new global comparatisms, and so on), but anticolonial criticism as insistence on local autonomy and self-determination, in setting multiple, epistemically distributed terms for any such critical debate.

‐ Brian Lennon

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Still, all this might require imagining a methodology which, beyond marking positive connective relations between positive (visible) figures (Thoreau and Commandante Marcos), however far flung from each other, sees in “deep time” (the cue taken from Dimock’s work, below) the figure of erasure that any insurgent self-critical project of Euro-Atlantic modernity itself—such as a renovated ecocritical or any other criticism—must also face. We mustn’t forget, perhaps, that there is no properly “global scale” for comparison: “the globe” is a circumscriptive figure, in equal or greater measure as it is inclusive.

‐ Brian Lennon

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Ursula K. Heise makes a consonant argument in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford UP, 2008), which looks at (among other dimensions of the evolution of ecocritical thought itself) the dynamic tension through which the globalist-environmentalist thought of the 1960s-70s propelled itself forward in tension with the U.S American line of antimodernist environmentalist and ecocritical localism.

‐ Brian Lennon

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The conversion of the previously noncomputational into the computational evokes the debates over AI that, in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, John Searle succinctly summarizes and participates in. Searle’s position is that computational processes cannot simulate consciousness.

The conversion of the previously noncomputational into the computational evokes the debates over AI that, in his book The Mystery of Consciousness, John Searle succinctly summarizes and participates in. Searle’s position is that computational processes cannot simulate consciousness.

‐ Ben Underwood

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The gloss provided by Ben Underwood echoes, rather than disputes, the approach taken in the work described here. Various critiques of the capacity of computing technologies to represent many everyday aspects of human cognition, much less consciousness, are well known. The work here acknowledges such limitations and embraces critical perspectives of AI such as provided by Searle, Winograd and Flores, Agre, and others. The goal of the GRIOT system is not to model consciousness. It is not full system autonomy or machine competence at a Turing-test style for story generation.

The gloss provided by Ben Underwood echoes, rather than disputes, the approach taken in the work described here. Various critiques of the capacity of computing technologies to represent many everyday aspects of human cognition, much less consciousness, are well known. The work here acknowledges such limitations and embraces critical perspectives of AI such as provided by Searle, Winograd and Flores, Agre, and others. The goal of the GRIOT system is not to model consciousness. It is not full system autonomy or machine competence at a Turing-test style for story generation. Rather, when addressing issues of human subjectivity my goal is to allow *human* authors to use formalization as a form of meaningful expression, one that enables content that variable along some dimensions (e.g. narrative or poetic structure) while variable along others (e.g. affective tone, theme, metaphorical exposition). Meaning arises from situated, embodied, and distributed human interpretation, not from the system itself. The GRIOT approach means that digital media authors/artists can begin to think about their software in a new way – just as a goal of higher level programming languages is to allow computer scientists to think in terms of problems and solutions as opposed to algorithmic steps, a goal of the GRIOT approach is to allow higher level digital media arts authorship where the author specifies a range of improvisational interactions to be meaningfully completed by a user rather than designing every interaction explicitly.

‐ D. Fox Harrell

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Worden’s reading of the show as a staging ground for neoliberal individualism echoes a number of critiques of contemporary gaming culture, particularly Jan Van Looy’s reading of the player as uomo economicus in Dungeons & Dragons.

‐ Ed Finn

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LeClair has extended his notion of prodigious fiction in his essay on recent novels that rewrite canonical texts such as Lolita and Moby Dick among others.

LeClair has extended his notion of prodigious fiction in his essay on recent novels that rewrite canonical texts such as Lolita and Moby Dick among others.

‐ Ben Underwood

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The Critical Ecologies thread was established by Joseph Tabbi and Cary Wolfe in 1997, revisited by Andrew McMurray in 2006, and persists in the writings of Stephen Dougherty, Rob Swigart, and of course in the
present discussion.

The Critical Ecologies thread was established by Joseph Tabbi and Cary Wolfe in 1997, revisited by Andrew McMurray in 2006, and persists in the writings of Stephen Dougherty, Rob Swigart, and of course in the
present discussion.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Another Foucauldian work, like Livingston’s concerned with performativity and self-reference in literary theory, is Rey Chow’s Age of the World Target, given the third degree by reviewer Ken Hirschkop. Read the review here.

Another Foucauldian work, like Livingston’s concerned with performativity and self-reference in literary theory, is Rey Chow’s Age of the World Target, given the third degree by reviewer Ken Hirschkop. Read the review here.

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Stephen Dougherty critiques the usefulness of systems theory in his review of Andrew McMurry’s Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature, calling instead for “a new sense of how epistemology and ontology can complement one another.” Read the complete review here.

Stephen Dougherty critiques the usefulness of systems theory in his review of Andrew McMurry’s Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature, calling instead for “a new sense of how epistemology and ontology can complement one another.” Read the complete review here.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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In Christopher Funkhouser’s review of the ELC, he points out that the material gathered in this collection could hardly be more representative of what is happening in various digital genres of writing, or better presented.

In Christopher Funkhouser’s review of the ELC, he points out that the material gathered in this collection could hardly be more representative of what is happening in various digital genres of writing, or better presented.

‐ Lori Emerson

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John Zuern’s review of the ELC also touches on the pedagogical possibilities of the collection.

John Zuern’s review of the ELC also touches on the pedagogical possibilities of the collection.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In 1996, for an early ebr special on intellectuals and the public sphere, Joseph Tabbi and Gregory Ulmer discussed “what intellectual work would be like in the new electracy.” How far their predictions held true, can be seen by comparing the old ebr with the current interface that features new essays on Ulmer’s work.

In 1996, for an early ebr special on intellectuals and the public sphere, Joseph Tabbi and Gregory Ulmer discussed “what intellectual work would be like in the new electracy.” How far their predictions held true, can be seen by comparing the old ebr with the current interface that features new essays on Ulmer’s work.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Chris Carter’s ebr interview with Ulmer delves more deeply into how the FRE’s emerAgency incorporates heuretics into Web-based discourse. Ulmer’s attention to the consumerist tendencies of popular culture helps the FRE form a poetics that is at once oppositional and generative. Marc Bousquet in turn comments on Carter’s interview in “Teaching the Cyborg.”

Chris Carter’s ebr interview with Ulmer delves more deeply into how the FRE’s emerAgency incorporates heuretics into Web-based discourse. Ulmer’s attention to the consumerist tendencies of popular culture helps the FRE form a poetics that is at once oppositional and generative. Marc Bousquet in turn comments on Carter’s interview in “Teaching the Cyborg.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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Victor Vitanza reviews Ulmer’s Heuretics and contextualizes it in relation to Ulmer’s oeuvre.

Victor Vitanza reviews Ulmer’s Heuretics and contextualizes it in relation to Ulmer’s oeuvre.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Reviewing Ira Livingston’s book on autopoiesis, Stephen Doughterty marks a convergence between fractal complexity and imaginative writing by pointing out how words are themselves fractal in their organization and evolution.

Reviewing Ira Livingston’s book on autopoiesis, Stephen Doughterty marks a convergence between fractal complexity and imaginative writing by pointing out how words are themselves fractal in their organization and evolution.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Manovitch’s groundbreaking book, The Language of New Media, is reviewed in ebr by Geniwate.

Manovitch’s groundbreaking book, The Language of New Media, is reviewed in ebr by Geniwate.

‐ Lori Emerson

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The competition between narrative and play in games resembles modernism’s attempt to exclude narrative from painting as described by Brian McHale in “What Was Postmodernism?”

‐ Ben Underwood

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Even though the collection lacks a formal timeline, Chris Funkhouser praises the possibility of tracing the evolution of digital textuality within the past two decades in his own review of ELC 1, also available on ebr.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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Our treatment of words and letters as material objects is of particular concern to Walter Benn Michaels in The Shape of the Signifier, reviewed here by Lori Emerson.

‐ Lori Emerson

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ebr has long been an advocate of critical and creative pieces on/of eletronic literature – its ever-growing collection of writing includes work by the editors of the ELC (Strickland, Hayles, Montfort, and Rettberg) as well as work by contributors to the ELC (Strickland, Hayles, Montfort, and Rettberg) as well as work by contributors to the ELC (Sondheim, Memmott, and Stefans).

‐ Lori Emerson

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Linda Brigham writes of how Hayles, in My Mother was a Computer, in her continued vigilance against technologically inspired monisms, has produced not only a critical book, but a riven, multifocal book, far from equilibrium.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Adalaide Morris more specifically considers the ‘tutor texts’ in the Electronic Literature Collection and, in doing so, articulates a poetics for the emerging field of e-lit. Chris Funkhouser, on the other hand, reads the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 as an effective reflection of literary expression and areas of textual exploration in digital form.

‐ Lori Emerson

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This issue of autobiography is related to the way in which Jean Genet’s autobiography operates; see Tim Keane’s essay “Entre Chien et Loup.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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For a related discussion of AIDS, see Harold Jaffe’s essay “Outcast Narrative” as well as Tim Keane’s “Above Us Only Sky.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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By contrast to the model of principled law-breaking, see Tim Keane’s review “God Help Us: A Fury for God” in which he discusses the influence of the imprisoned Egyptian Qutb’s influence on Islamist suicide bombing as a mode for resisting secularist regimes in the Mideast.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Kenneth Saltman’s discussion of Michael Milken’s post-prison foray into the education business is a useful contrast to Matlin’s references to Clinton and Cuomo’s involvement in gutting education initiatives in American prisons.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Alger’s idea that the gamist/narrativist dichotomy is useful for those playing games rather than those designing or theorizing about games, evokes Stanley Fish‘s notion that interpretive communities determines one’s reading of a text in Is There a Text in This Class?

Alger’s idea that the gamist/narrativist dichotomy is useful for those playing games rather than those designing or theorizing about games, evokes Stanley Fish‘s notion that interpretive communities determines one’s reading of a text in Is There a Text in This Class?

‐ Ben Underwood

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Marjorie Perloff has long advocated rereading the development of 20th century poetry through modernist experiments of the historic avant-garde – using works such as Mallarme’s as touchstones rather than as examples of literary aberrations.

‐ Lori Emerson

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All three ebr reviews (by Chris Funkhouser, Adalaide Morris, and John Zuern) on the Electronic Literature Collection touch on the ways in which e-writing builds on a rich tradition of bookbound, constraint-based writing.

‐ Lori Emerson

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While this critique is true perhaps of Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer, a wider sample of Hayles’s work – especially her most recent collection of essays Electronic Literature – reveals just this kind of use of the literary to read the technological. In Electronic Literature Hayles urges us to read electronic literature not as reflecting but rather “reflecting upon the media from which it springs” (88).

‐ Lori Emerson

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Regarding the demand for “close attention to what’s stable and continuous”: The point is a solid one, of course. But I wonder if this emphasis on progressive continuity doesn’t sit at some odds with a recent turn to figures of cyclic or folded temporality, in U.S.-based new media literary and cultural studies (Gitelman, *Always Already New;* Acland, *Residual Media;* Zielinski et al., *Deep Time of the Media;* Funkhouser, *Prehistoric Digital Poetry*…) — and with what one might read from that turn, perhaps, as a newly self-conscious and justly sensitive form of temporizing attention to the field’s own imperial Euro-Atlantic First Worldism *as* a research field. To its own complete dependence, in other words, on wealth-dependent (and as such, highly leveraged) habits and levels of energy consumption. If the argument in Kirschenbaum’s groundbreaking book, as used to support this point here, contains one intellectual infelicity, one might say it lies in this emphasis on the *remanence* of data, deployed against the virtualities of the poststructuralist imagination, at precisely that cultural moment when the permanence of the progressive civilizational legacies of Euro-Atlantic modernity is a question, rather than an answer, for more core subjects of the U.S. empire than at any time perhaps since the 1970s. In postwar U.S. literary studies at its boldest, anyway, “literarity” has always been understood to include the undisciplined Nietzschean temporality of the event, as well as its Weberian secular avocation.

‐ Brian Lennon

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Again, while this is fine and correct praise for Kirschenbaum’s method and its achievements, in this book, it also reminds us, perhaps, of the ethico-critical problem posed by Foucault’s discursive histories, in their basically descriptive restriction to the *partial* world enclosed by Euro-Atlantic modernity. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s early analysis (in the widely cited essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) of the consequences of Foucault’s refusal of ideology critique remains apposite here, as does the engagement with technology and media studies throughout her work.

‐ Brian Lennon

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One reason, perhaps, to discontinue “speaking of a specifically American literary tradition uniquely suited to the critique of technology and modernity” might be to withdraw the license this provides, *even as a critical diagnosis,* for further inward-gazing appropriations of the sort this essay elsewhere so articulately resists. Is it really unthinkable that the entire intellectual tradition of U.S. exceptionalism, in all of its right, liberal, and leftish versions, will someday be decisively shadowed by imperial decline?

‐ Brian Lennon

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Indeed, the technology of the telegraph and its institutions are with us today, though no longer under Western Union’s name, which suspended the service indefinitely in 2006. Today, there are a handful of companies that will do you a telegram (some arriving after Western Union’s departure), to some extent revisioning its role as a priority messaging system with a touch of old world charm. (In New Zealand, business clients can have a courier-delivered telegram for the primary purpose of debt recovery). These services are arguably vestigial, banking off nostalgia more than anything else. But from the background, as the essay suggests, they persist in shaping practices.

‐ Dave Ciccoricco

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Jason Mittell explores the cross-media hybridity of another long-term narrative, The Wire, in this Third Person essay.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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The claim that game rules must fit within generic tropes evokes Newman’s discussion of the incorporation of multiple popular-narrative genres into his choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, Life’s Lottery.

‐ Ben Underwood

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In Critical Environments, Wolfe also explores the theoretical and pragmatic similarities and differences between Luhmannian systems theory and contemporary Marxist philosophy. On pages 147-149, his theoretical sympathies with Luhmann and his political sympathies with Fredric Jameson seem to pull him in opposite, perhaps contradictory directions.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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John Bruni has also reviewed Wolfe’s collection for ebr.

‐ Ryan Brooks

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World of Warcraft, or WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world. The game’s community website can be found here: WoW Community Site and its wiki here: WoW Community Site

World of Warcraft, or WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world. The game’s community website can be found here: WoW Community Site and its wiki here: WoW Community Site

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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Douglas’ argument operates in interesting tension with Jill Walker’s essay on the nature of quests in World of Warcraft. Walker argues that “a game is a network of fragments, most of which are not necessary to experience the game fully, and yet which cumulate into a rich experience of a storied world.” In other words, Douglas identifies an immovable cultural concept in WoW, hard-coded racial specificity, in a universe that otherwise depends on fluid and adaptive experience.

Douglas’ argument operates in interesting tension with Jill Walker’s essay on the nature of quests in World of Warcraft. Walker argues that “a game is a network of fragments, most of which are not necessary to experience the game fully, and yet which cumulate into a rich experience of a storied world.” In other words, Douglas identifies an immovable cultural concept in WoW, hard-coded racial specificity, in a universe that otherwise depends on fluid and adaptive experience.

‐ Ed Finn

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Earlier work by McGann has been discussed in ebr by Matt Kirshenbaum, formly his student at the University of Virgina.

Earlier work by McGann has been discussed in ebr by Matt Kirshenbaum, formly his student at the University of Virgina.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Acheson’s multimedia version of this plaintext version can effectively comment on it – reinforcing, critiquing, contradicting what is said by what is seen. McMurry makes a similar point in his introduction to Acheson’s review when he notes that “effective integration of text and image is not yet possible on the web, which requires the segregation of text from image if text is to be made available as text.”

Acheson’s multimedia version of this plaintext version can effectively comment on it – reinforcing, critiquing, contradicting what is said by what is seen. McMurry makes a similar point in his introduction to Acheson’s review when he notes that “effective integration of text and image is not yet possible on the web, which requires the segregation of text from image if text is to be made available as text.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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In his contribution to Second Person Greg Costikyan imagines how to move beyond the beads-on-a-string model of game play.

In his contribution to Second Person Greg Costikyan imagines how to move beyond the beads-on-a-string model of game play.

‐ Ben Underwood

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R. M. Berry’s recent novel Frank offers a variation on Mary Shelly’s overreacher ur-text Frankenstein. ebr contains a debate between Joseph Tabbi and Berry inspired by Tabbi’s review of the novel.

R. M. Berry’s recent novel Frank offers a variation on Mary Shelly’s overreacher ur-text Frankenstein. ebr contains a debate between Joseph Tabbi and Berry inspired by Tabbi’s review of the novel.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Systems theory provides another way to think about connected organizational forms that escapes this binary. Linda Brigham’s review of Cultural Critique’s special issues on “The Politics of Systems and Environments” introduces the topic.

‐ Aron Pease

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The relationship between houses, domestication, and the gradual shift from cyclic to linear time in human consciousness is discussed at greater length in Swigart’s “Past Futures, Future’s Past.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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In his short story Dispersion, Swigart describes a quasi-supernatural phenomenon that evokes the link between biological and technological evolution.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Chris Messenger has reviewed the prequal to Passing On – Passing Off – which reveals more about Keever’s career as a basketball player. Messenger delves into the relationship between LeClair’s critical interest in the systems novel and his fictional work.

Chris Messenger has reviewed the prequal to Passing On – Passing Off – which reveals more about Keever’s career as a basketball player. Messenger delves into the relationship between LeClair’s critical interest in the systems novel and his fictional work.

‐ Ben Underwood

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On the contention that works of literature need to be, defensively, cordoned off from the world (including the world of literary theory) see Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book, Technological
Obsolescence, reviewed in ebr by Anthony Enns.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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It’s no surprise, then, that Daniel Reiss claims in his ebr review of Roger Chartier’s Forms and Meanings that the greatest insight afforded by Ong’s scholarship is that altering the forms by which thought is expressed and disseminated alters the process of thought itself.

‐ Lori Emerson

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While Jarrett argues for rap as rhapsody, Rob Wittig presses for a future revival of hip-hop as the art of the troubadour.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Echoing Jarrett’s claim for hip-hop as montage, Marcus Boon’s “Sublime Frequencies’ Ethnopsychedelic Montages” drives home to us that hip hop emerged out of the B-Boys’ taste for African polyrhythms purloined from old vinyl reshaped and engineered on turntables and mixers.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Newman’s incorporation of multiple popular-narrative genres into her choose-your-own-adventure-style novel evokes the issue of properly handling genre-specific tropes that Wallis argues is essential in crafting story-telling engines for games – not only semi-playable novels.

‐ Ben Underwood

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A recent essay by Michaels on the films of Christopher Nolan has appeared in an electropoetics collection assembled by Lori Emerson.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Walter Benn Michaels‘s The Shape of the Signifier, to which Melley is referring, was the subject of a review for ebr by Lori Emerson, which elicited several ripostes.

Walter Benn Michaels‘s The Shape of the Signifier, to which Melley is referring, was the subject of a review for ebr by Lori Emerson, which elicited several ripostes.

‐ Ben Underwood

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In his review of Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories for ebr, Melley argues that Fenster takes conspiracy theory seriously, regarding it as a “populist theory of power.”

In his review of Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories for ebr, Melley argues that Fenster takes conspiracy theory seriously, regarding it as a “populist theory of power.”

‐ Ben Underwood

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On the social context for endless exploration in game narratives, see Jan Van Looy, who suggests that endless, inconsequential “discovery” could be an end in itself, consistent with a culture of flexible work and endless capital accumulation.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Marjorie Perloff offers another “nifty demonstration” of her trademark style of close-reading in “Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics.”

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Jerome McGann addresses on ebr the so-called “Crisis in the Humanities” in the context of two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums and archives, and the explicitly parallel “Crisis in Tenure and Publishing” that has more recently come to attention.

‐ Lori Emerson

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David Zauhar provides a critical overview of Perloff’s oeuvre from the 1990s and similarly reads her readings as ways of doing, rather than saying.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Baldwin’s essay on Digital Poetics was also recently published on ebr and can be viewed here: Against Digital Poetics.

Baldwin’s essay on Digital Poetics was also recently published on ebr and can be viewed here: Against Digital Poetics.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer
attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a
computer virus, or a trojan horse. Generally, a compromised machine is
only one of many in a botnet, and will be used to perform malicious
tasks of one sort or another under remote direction. Most owners of
zombie computers are unaware that their system is being used in this
way. Because the owner tends to be unaware, these computers are
metaphorically compared to zombies.

A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer
attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a
computer virus, or a trojan horse. Generally, a compromised machine is
only one of many in a botnet, and will be used to perform malicious
tasks of one sort or another under remote direction. Most owners of
zombie computers are unaware that their system is being used in this
way. Because the owner tends to be unaware, these computers are
metaphorically compared to zombies. For more information see: Zombie Computer Wiki.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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For a related essay that argues in support of Federman as a political thinker, see Jan Baetans’ review of Larry McCaffery’s Federman A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative.

For a related essay that argues in support of Federman as a political thinker, see Jan Baetans’ review of Larry McCaffery’s Federman A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Even the photograph complementing this section does not show Federman’s private part, but invites private imaginations to visualize what is covered up by Federman’s cupped hands.

Even the photograph complementing this section does not show Federman’s private part, but invites private imaginations to visualize what is covered up by Federman’s cupped hands.

‐ Lori Emerson

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See our review-essay on the 2005 &Now Conference in which Ted Pelton addresses the difficulty of getting experimental writing published in the U.S.

See our review-essay on the 2005 &Now Conference in which Ted Pelton addresses the difficulty of getting experimental writing published in the U.S.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Throughout this riposte, Golumbia directly quotes and responds to assertions made by Brian Lennon in his book review of Golumbia’s The Cultural Logic of Computation and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Lennon’s review can be accessed here: Gaming the System as well as via the “Riposte To” link above.

Additionally, longer quotes that provide a bit more context are also provided in the glosses below.

Throughout this riposte, Golumbia directly quotes and responds to assertions made by Brian Lennon in his book review of Golumbia’s The Cultural Logic of Computation and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Lennon’s review can be accessed here: Gaming the System as well as via the “Riposte To” link above.

Additionally, longer quotes that provide a bit more context are also provided in the glosses below. Here, for example, is the entire sentence from which this quote is taken: “But the other filament in Golumbia’s theoretical braid, one which sits at some odds with the spirit of this poststructuralist salvage operation, is a Weberian conflation of capitalist rationalism with evangelical Christianity, which Golumbia doesn’t do much to differentiate, in The Cultural Logic of Computation, from that counter-mystification through which modern liberal and left Euro-Atlantic secular intellectuals have imagined themselves somehow undefiled by the permeative cultural Christianity they discern in the enterprises of their declared opponents.”

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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From Gaming the System: “Such dubiety is conspicuous in Golumbia’s inventive critique of Chomsky, which, far from accepting that Chomsky has any place on the left at all, near or far, banishes him unceremoniously to the right of The Cultural Logic of Computation’s epistemo-political fold.

From Gaming the System: “Such dubiety is conspicuous in Golumbia’s inventive critique of Chomsky, which, far from accepting that Chomsky has any place on the left at all, near or far, banishes him unceremoniously to the right of The Cultural Logic of Computation’s epistemo-political fold. Chomsky as “citation champ” drives the entire rightish intellective formation of computationalism, rerouting one academic discipline (linguistics) away from its leftish culturalism and exerting regressive pressure on a host of related orders, as well (psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science).”

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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From Gaming the System: “Without a doubt, McGurl’s comparatively steady poise is an asset, in so far as in its best pages, the work of The Program Era invites a response remote from the customary conflict mode, with its irresistibly predictable autocritical “problematizations.” But as we have noted, that, perhaps, is only one way of marking, in its contradistinctive change, in both of these undeductibly appraisable works, the danger of ending by merely, as it were, gaming the System: the custom Golumbia marks as a “style of authority,” and for which his final example is Bill Gates and S

From Gaming the System: “Without a doubt, McGurl’s comparatively steady poise is an asset, in so far as in its best pages, the work of The Program Era invites a response remote from the customary conflict mode, with its irresistibly predictable autocritical “problematizations.” But as we have noted, that, perhaps, is only one way of marking, in its contradistinctive change, in both of these undeductibly appraisable works, the danger of ending by merely, as it were, gaming the System: the custom Golumbia marks as a “style of authority,” and for which his final example is Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, two Harvard mathematics majors assured of their place in the ruling class, ignoring their courses, then cramming “like mad” for the final exam (199). That that risk remains in the end fairly distant, here, wastes nothing of the categorical imperative to regard it.”

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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From Gaming the System:”Working both centrifugally and centripetally from the relations of production of The Cultural Logic of Computation itself (not least in its status as a “tenure book”), Golumbia seats the female or feminized operators of a domestic workforce democratized by war’s exigency at the controls of the computer as world-war machine, suggestively linking the feminized technocratic class of the intellectuals to the subjugation-within-subjugation of the human computer under masculinist technocratic administration.”

From Gaming the System:”Working both centrifugally and centripetally from the relations of production of The Cultural Logic of Computation itself (not least in its status as a “tenure book”), Golumbia seats the female or feminized operators of a domestic workforce democratized by war’s exigency at the controls of the computer as world-war machine, suggestively linking the feminized technocratic class of the intellectuals to the subjugation-within-subjugation of the human computer under masculinist technocratic administration.”

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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Leavenworth’s allusion to “forbidden” and “life-altering” knowledge evokes Goethe’s Faust, a text Marjorie Perloff dwells on in her reivew of Franco Moretti.

Leavenworth’s allusion to “forbidden” and “life-altering” knowledge evokes Goethe’s Faust, a text Marjorie Perloff dwells on in her reivew of Franco Moretti.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Timothy Melley‘s “Paranoid Modernity” begins by considering how “everything is connected” has become a tag line for postmodern totalities in Pynchon and DeLillo.

Timothy Melley‘s “Paranoid Modernity” begins by considering how “everything is connected” has become a tag line for postmodern totalities in Pynchon and DeLillo.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Readers of Hayles’ book should seek out a copy of the prescient, more wide-ranging volume by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Rational Geomancy: The kids of the book-machine : the collected research reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982) (Talonbooks, 1992).

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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A long time contributor to ebr, R. M. Berry has previously explored the role of the Avant-Garde in literature, which can be read here: The Avant-Garde and the Question of Literature, and his informative exchange with Joseph Tabbi in the wake of Tabbi’s review of Berry’s novel Frank can be read here: Blank Frank.

A long time contributor to ebr, R. M. Berry has previously explored the role of the Avant-Garde in literature, which can be read here: The Avant-Garde and the Question of Literature, and his informative exchange with Joseph Tabbi in the wake of Tabbi’s review of Berry’s novel Frank can be read here: Blank Frank.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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Marjorie Perloff speaks of the ‘End of Humanities’ as having become a sub-genre of academic writing. See Douglas Barbour’s review of Perloff here.

Marjorie Perloff speaks of the ‘End of Humanities’ as having become a sub-genre of academic writing. See Douglas Barbour’s review of Perloff here.

‐

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For more on Milch, see his Wiki.

Also, for the first in a series of “Milch on Milch” videos in which he describes the creative process on Deadwood while also discussing his larger themes of Order vs. Chaos and Civilizaion vs. The Wild, see here: David Milch of Deadwood.

For more on Milch, see his Wiki.

Also, for the first in a series of “Milch on Milch” videos in which he describes the creative process on Deadwood while also discussing his larger themes of Order vs. Chaos and Civilizaion vs. The Wild, see here: David Milch of Deadwood.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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While O’Sullivan points to Milch’s HBO series John From Cincinnati in his notes, Milch’s extensive involvement with the long-running TV serial NYPD Blue, which he co-created with writer/producer Steven Bocho, is also relevant to discussions of his experience with seriality.

While O’Sullivan points to Milch’s HBO series John From Cincinnati in his notes, Milch’s extensive involvement with the long-running TV serial NYPD Blue, which he co-created with writer/producer Steven Bocho, is also relevant to discussions of his experience with seriality.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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While Deadwood’s HBO website no longer exists, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under can still be viewed.

While Deadwood’s HBO website no longer exists, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under can still be viewed.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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Michael Boyden interviews Oulipian Harry Mathews on ebr; here Mathews traces his own engagement with constraint to 14th century and modernist composers.

Michael Boyden interviews Oulipian Harry Mathews on ebr; here Mathews traces his own engagement with constraint to 14th century and modernist composers.

‐ Lori Emerson

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David Foster Wallace may also be said to push the thresholds of language and form, as is evident in Benzon’s ebr review of Wallace’s Oblivion.

David Foster Wallace may also be said to push the thresholds of language and form, as is evident in Benzon’s ebr review of Wallace’s Oblivion.

‐ Lori Emerson

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As Stephen-Paul Martin points out in his ebr review of Lance Olsen’s novel 10:01, Will Navidson, the protagonist in Danielewski’s House of Leaves, later appears as 10:01‘s second character Stuart Navidson.

As Stephen-Paul Martin points out in his ebr review of Lance Olsen’s novel 10:01, Will Navidson, the protagonist in Danielewski’s House of Leaves, later appears as 10:01‘s second character Stuart Navidson.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Further inte(re)views with novelists Harry Mathews and Lee Siegel can also be found on ebr.

Further inte(re)views with novelists Harry Mathews and Lee Siegel can also be found on ebr.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Ted Pelton reflects on another Creeley keyword, “dig,” in his 2005 essay on In Company, a collection of image/text collaborations.

Ted Pelton reflects on another Creeley keyword, “dig,” in his 2005 essay on In Company, a collection of image/text collaborations.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In his essay “An Inside and an Outside” on Creeley’s final publications Life & Death and If I Were Writing This, Douglas Manson also points to Creeley’s beguilingly precise writing.

In his essay “An Inside and an Outside” on Creeley’s final publications Life & Death and If I Were Writing This, Douglas Manson also points to Creeley’s beguilingly precise writing.

‐ Lori Emerson

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David Zauhar’s essay “Perloff in the Nineties” reviews, among her other works, Wittgenstein’s Ladder – a work which he claims is at least partly about how certain novelists and poets undertake projects that Wittgenstein himself appropriated for philosophy.

David Zauhar’s essay “Perloff in the Nineties” reviews, among her other works, Wittgenstein’s Ladder – a work which he claims is at least partly about how certain novelists and poets undertake projects that Wittgenstein himself appropriated for philosophy.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Some of McCaffery’s interaction with Vollmann is documented in “Expelled From Eden:” (a William T. Vollmann Reader), which McCaffery edited along with Michael Hemmingson.

‐ Andrew Burchiel

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Swigart discusses literal ecological fragility in his essay Not Just a River.

‐ Ben Underwood

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As Martin Rosenberg shows us, Deleuze and Guattari’s difficult tour de force A Thousand Plateaus is similarly accessible in that it can be used in conjunction with topics as varied as feminist visual art and cognitive science.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Take a look at M. Wolf-Meyer’s “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference” in The Journal of Popular Culture 36.3 (Mar 2003). Wolf-Meyer discusses the restrained nature of the superhero relative to their superpowered abilities. In a way, I think this argument might resonate with some of the radical possibility that is open to us in the digital age. We have free reign to generate representations with great range, reach, and capacity, but they must subsist on some terrain of intelligibility. Wolf-Meyer discusses this from a Marxist perspective.

‐ Davin Heckman

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The film version of Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder, was released in 2009.

‐

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Moore’s Promethea, on the other hand, is something akin to a theoretical text which gives a great deal of attention to Moore’s metaphysical views. Promethea starts as a superhero story, but quickly turns into a meditation on the relationship between reality and representation. In a way, it reminds me of Yeats’ Golden Dawn years, but without the pretension… and it offers further insight into the meaning of an under language. In Promethea, the under langauge is not simply a technique that is available to the comic book writer, but it fits with some primordial sense of what language is and what consciousness does, and models it in a manner consistent with the sort of Hermetic (“as above, so below”) view that underpins Moore’s work. Promethea also picks up on apocalyptic themes developed in the Watchmen and From Hell, but suggests that transformations don’t have to be sinister… they can be utopian, too, if we learn how the proper spells of consciousness.

‐ Davin Heckman

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With regards to Bizarro World, it is worth noting that the absurd inversions in the Bizarro Superman comics of the 1950s and 60s typically anchored themselves to middle class American norms and institutions in order to achieve their comic purposes. Imperfection is always registered in relationship to an implicitly perfect ideal, thus Bizarro Superman has a wife, a dog, children. They live in a suburban neighborhood. Bizarro Lois cleans the house by making it dirty.

‐ Davin Heckman

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Ted Pelton’s review of the 2006 &Now conference discusses the history of FC2 and how Tomasula picks up the thread of the novelistic in presumably stable discourse by choosing as his subject Alan Sokal’s infamous fraudulent essay on quantum gravity in Social Text.

Ted Pelton’s review of the 2006 &Now conference discusses the history of FC2 and how Tomasula picks up the thread of the novelistic in presumably stable discourse by choosing as his subject Alan Sokal’s infamous fraudulent essay on quantum gravity in Social Text.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In his essay, Satisfying Ambiguity, Swigart points to Victor Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels as an example of the use of color to organize knowledge.

In his essay, Satisfying Ambiguity, Swigart points to Victor Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels as an example of the use of color to organize knowledge.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Speaking of dispersed, technology’s redefinition of the contours of quotidian existence is also a subject of Swigart’s earlier story, Dispersion.

Speaking of dispersed, technology’s redefinition of the contours of quotidian existence is also a subject of Swigart’s earlier story, Dispersion.

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ebr contributors Diane Goodman and Elisa Sheffield write of the postfeminist fiction anthology Chick-Lit – an anthology which also aims, as Neigh writes, to disrupt normative definitions of narrative.

ebr contributors Diane Goodman and Elisa Sheffield write of the postfeminist fiction anthology Chick-Lit – an anthology which also aims, as Neigh writes, to disrupt normative definitions of narrative.

‐ Lori Emerson

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The electronic book review initially defined the word “review” in the sense of a “retrospective”; see “A Review of Books in the Age of Their Technological Obsolescence.” The editors’ opinion on the timing of ebr reviews are given in the introduction to the thread, Fictions Present.

The electronic book review initially defined the word “review” in the sense of a “retrospective”; see “A Review of Books in the Age of Their Technological Obsolescence.” The editors’ opinion on the timing of ebr reviews are given in the introduction to the thread, Fictions Present.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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A small publisher himself, Ted Pelton reinforces Bernstein’s argument for the necessity of noncommerical literary publishing in his report on &Now, A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art.

A small publisher himself, Ted Pelton reinforces Bernstein’s argument for the necessity of noncommerical literary publishing in his report on &Now, A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art.

‐

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Bernstein’s “Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies” is a companion piece of sorts – exploring instead the freedoms|restrictions inherent to the space of the internet.

‐ Lori Emerson

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The participation of the reader in a text has been a lively topic in literary theory for some time. While Hindmarch contends that “[a] novel is already complete when it is read,” many theorists would take issue with this claim. Perhaps the most fully developed manifestation of this position has been formulated with regard to poetry, rather than fiction, by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian.

The participation of the reader in a text has been a lively topic in literary theory for some time. While Hindmarch contends that “[a] novel is already complete when it is read,” many theorists would take issue with this claim. Perhaps the most fully developed manifestation of this position has been formulated with regard to poetry, rather than fiction, by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Translating dice-roll data into a story is more an act of composition than translation, which is not to say that translation is a simple matter. George Steiner, in After Babel, has argued that translation is not only difficult , but well nigh impossible. The translation that Hindmarch describes is closer to a young Ronald Reagan‘s play-by-play radio broadcasts of baseball games he couldn’t actually see.

Translating dice-roll data into a story is more an act of composition than translation, which is not to say that translation is a simple matter. George Steiner, in After Babel, has argued that translation is not only difficult , but well nigh impossible. The translation that Hindmarch describes is closer to a young Ronald Reagan‘s play-by-play radio broadcasts of baseball games he couldn’t actually see. According to legend, Reagan quite successfully simulated the commentary of an on-field announcer by reading the plays from a ticker tape machine.

‐ Ben Underwood

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There is a convergence here. In the last half-century, media and media machines have increasingly become the means of production. Hardt and Negri (among others) have argued that immaterial or communicative labor is the new dominant form of labor (dominant in terms of tendency not number), and this labor primarily produces knowledge, images, and affects. For instance, communicative laborers involved in bringing a pair of athletic shoes to market, do this using computers, specialized languages, images, and other media in order to produce media that make up the product “shoes.” As a commodity, “shoes” is something more or other than its mere material self. If media today are the means of production used by the dominant labor forms, then media theorists such as Carey and Kittler are today’s Marxists.

‐ Aron Pease

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In his essay on the free-form game Everyway, Jonathan Tweet discusses the importance of constraints for character creation.

In his essay on the free-form game Everyway, Jonathan Tweet discusses the importance of constraints for character creation.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Rob Wittig posits the origin of hip hop (and, incidentally, the invention of love), in the age of the troubadours (12th century France).

Rob Wittig posits the origin of hip hop (and, incidentally, the invention of love), in the age of the troubadours (12th century France).

‐ Lori Emerson

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ebr itself is an ongoing experiment in creating a generative, user-friendly interface. ebr has documented the conversations (by Anne Burdick, Joseph Tabbi, Mark Amerika) underlying the launches of various interfaces over the years.

ebr itself is an ongoing experiment in creating a generative, user-friendly interface. ebr has documented the conversations (by Anne Burdick, Joseph Tabbi, Mark Amerika) underlying the launches of various interfaces over the years. Lorne Falk also writes for ebr on the affective interface and Linda Brigham on the interface as a form of artificial life.

‐ Lori Emerson

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McMurry continues his work on ecocriticism in a review of Lee Rozelle’s Ecosublime. In a similar vein, William Major measures academic “ecocriticism” against the practical “agrarianism” of Wendell Berry.

McMurry continues his work on ecocriticism in a review of Lee Rozelle’s Ecosublime. In a similar vein, William Major measures academic “ecocriticism” against the practical “agrarianism” of Wendell Berry.

‐ Lori Emerson

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This was before ‘cows on parade’ became an art marketing success in Chicago. In subsequent years, the author has noticed similar decorated cows (and not a few plasticine horses) in cities throughout Europe and also in Russia and the Ukraine.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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The tight connection between the form and content of contemporary “cybertexts” likewise, for Nick Montfort, becomes more clear when the one who pokes at the interface to see what will happen is being playful.

The tight connection between the form and content of contemporary “cybertexts” likewise, for Nick Montfort, becomes more clear when the one who pokes at the interface to see what will happen is being playful.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Elsewhere Michaels has made the well-known argument that interpretation is the search for intention. See the “Against Theory” essays that Michaels coauthored with Steven Knapp; the essays appeared in Critical Inquiry in the early eighties.

Elsewhere Michaels has made the well-known argument that interpretation is the search for intention. See the “Against Theory” essays that Michaels coauthored with Steven Knapp; the essays appeared in Critical Inquiry in the early eighties.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Derrida delves deeply into the concepts of readability and iterability in Limited Inc, and Bill Seaman thinks about how these ideas function in electronic environments in “Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics.”

Derrida delves deeply into the concepts of readability and iterability in Limited Inc, and Bill Seaman thinks about how these ideas function in electronic environments in “Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics.”

‐ Ben Underwood

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See Stephen-Paul Martin’s revealing review, “Already Too Many Stories in the World,” of Olsen’s 10:01.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Larry McCaffery writes of Elvis as a montage-artist in his ebr essay “White Noise/White Heat” on the postmodern in rock ‘n roll: he instinctively combined various American musical idioms (black gospel, blues and rhythm-and-blues, and white country-and-western) into a distinctively new form.

Larry McCaffery writes of Elvis as a montage-artist in his ebr essay “White Noise/White Heat” on the postmodern in rock ‘n roll: he instinctively combined various American musical idioms (black gospel, blues and rhythm-and-blues, and white country-and-western) into a distinctively new form.

‐ Lori Emerson

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The ebr thread “writing under constraint” offers us a panoply of works that operate on or through constraint – Alan Sondheim, for example, in “Verse in Reverse” elaborates on how the more strict the constraints, the more open, free, and plentiful the questions.

The ebr thread “writing under constraint” offers us a panoply of works that operate on or through constraint – Alan Sondheim, for example, in “Verse in Reverse” elaborates on how the more strict the constraints, the more open, free, and plentiful the questions.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Soren Pold persuasively puts it to us that by experimenting with formal constraints and how these constraints become thematic properties, we ourselves can discover how text is treated in our contemporary literary machines.

Soren Pold persuasively puts it to us that by experimenting with formal constraints and how these constraints become thematic properties, we ourselves can discover how text is treated in our contemporary literary machines.

‐ Lori Emerson

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Nick Dyer-Witheford offers a similar perspective when considering the production of collective subjectivity and “species being” in the non-iron realm of video games and virtual play.

‐ Aron Pease

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Walter Benn Michaels argues that Hardt and Negri make poverty into an identity to be recognized, rather than a condition to be eradicated. (Michaels’s _Shape of the Signifier_ is reviewed in ebr by Lori Emerson)

‐ Aron Pease

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See Paul Harris’s essay “Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms: A Re-viewing of Tlooth, Cigarettes, and The Journalist“ in which he rediscovers the senior American member of Oulipo on the occasion of three reprints from The Dalkey Archive Press.

See Paul Harris’s essay “Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms: A Re-viewing of Tlooth, Cigarettes, and The Journalist“ in which he rediscovers the senior American member of Oulipo on the occasion of three reprints from The Dalkey Archive Press.

‐ Lori Emerson

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The phrase “sadder but wiser” alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrator of “The Rime of the Anicient Mariner.” In the poem, the cursed, albatross-killing sailor tells his story to a wedding guest, and the final stanza of the poem describes the effect of the story on the listener: “He went like one that hath been stunned, / And is of sense forlorn: / A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn.”

‐ Ben Underwood

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We see this point in action in the comments on the game Budget Hero she mentions in the previous paragraph.

‐ Rob Swigart

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Not to be confused with my interactive novel Portal (1986) from Activision.

‐ Rob Swigart

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Jerome McGann’s NINES white paper is available on ebr as one of the first texts to be “enfolded” into the ebr interface.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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Kenneth J. Saltman, writing in the Technocapitalist thread, dicusses Michael Milken’s efforts to privatize education, which, Saltman argues, are aimed at “transforming public education into an investment opportunity for the wealthy,” endangering the foundation of a democratic society.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia introduces the COLLEX tool, a “COLL-ection” and “EX-hibition” of online images and interlinked texts in her white paper, which is available as an “enfolded” text on ebr.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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In her review of McGann’s book Radiant Textuality, Katherine Acheson argues that the usability and graphic quality of McGann’s interface designs have thus far not lived up to the high ambitions of these projects. She suggests that a redesign would be necessary before digital humanities scholarship can become a viable alternative to traditional scholarly publishing.

‐ Stefanie Boese

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John Matthias’ review of five different British poetry anthologies (“British Poetry at Y2K“) provides a larger context for the work of O’Sullivan, Raworth, and Fisher.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In her recent essay “Robert Creeley’s Radical Poetics,” Marjorie Perloff similarly explores the unsettling and so threatening language of Robert Creeley, with whom Raworth has long been associated.

‐ Lori Emerson

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In the ebr gathering on Corporate Fictions, Joseph Tabbi and Scott Rettberg cite the Manifold project initiated by Doug Armato at the University of Minnesota Press, as a model for Open Access academic publication.

‐ ebr Editor

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Melley’s term “agency panic,” presented in his 2008 and 2005 ebr contributions, is an alternative to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “anxiety of obsolescence” (as discussed by Anthony Enns).

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Passing On‘s bleak climactic scene provides the starting point for Stephen Schryer’s essay on LeClair’s fiction.

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See also Michael Boyden’s interview with Mathews in which he discusses this essay, along with a story and essay available on ebr: “The Dialect of the Tribe” and “Fearful Symmetries.”

‐ Lori Emerson

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Ebr houses three substantial looks at Hardt and Negri’s manifesto-esque texts – one by William Smith Wilson, another by Aron Pease, and the third by Nick Spencer.

Ebr houses three substantial looks at Hardt and Negri’s manifesto-esque texts – one by William Smith Wilson, another by Aron Pease, and the third by Nick Spencer.

‐ Ben Underwood

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The idea that genres carry “ideological luggage” is perhaps most expansively explored in Fredric Jameson’s 1982 The Political Unconscious. Nick Spencer has reviewed Jameson’s more recent work in ebr‘s Fictions Present thread.

‐ Ben Underwood

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McHale’s reference to R.E.M.’s angel imagery in the “Losing My Religion” video is spot on, but the band is a complicated touchstone in McHale’s discussion of the persistence of narrative in the postmodern period. Larry McCaffery in his essay for ebr, “White Noise/White Heat, or Why the Postmodern Turn in Rock Music Led to Nothing but Road,“ argues that R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe [not to mention Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Captain Beefheart, and Brian Eno] takes a sculptural, as opposed to narrative, approach to songwriting.

‐ Ben Underwood

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Although Mateas and Stern set off score with scare quotes, the fact that they resort to this terminology in describing social interaction and characters’ emotional states is not mere metaphor. Jan Van Looy argues in his riposte to Erik Mona that quantification of the qualitative undergirds tabletop gaming, and such quantification is unavoidable in a computer-based game that relies on binary code.

‐ Ben Underwood

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William Smith Wilson speaks similarly of a ‘world-poem,’ in reference to _Multitude_. – eds.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Walter Benn Michaels argues that Hardt and Negri make poverty
into an identity to be recognized, rather than a condition to be eradicated. (Michaels’s _Shape of the Signifier_ is reviewed in ebr by Lori Emerson)

‐ Aron Pease

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See Grace, Wit & Charm

‐ Davin Heckman

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The first shot was fired when Eskelinen declared “Hypertext is dead. Cybertext killed it” at the 1999 Digital Arts and Culture conference, which Hayles responded to in Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide. The bitter custody battle between hypertext theory and cybertext over the burgeoning field of electronic litterature is now a matter of the past, although it got heated due to the provocations of Eskelinen, whose inflammatory prose in Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying (hopefully, it will be the first and last time someone uses the terms ‘forrestgumpian’ or ‘montypythonesque’ on ebr) keeps drawing riPOSTes, with half of his corpus on ebr being responses to his provocations. Eskelinen: truly ahead of his time with his mastery of internet discourse.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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See “Hypertext” FAQ

‐ Davin Heckman

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This essay, for example, was updated and touched up in October 2024, four years after its initial publication. Like the present “marginal gloss,” these updates are dated and designated by our ebr editorial team as part of an ongoing editorial practice. An historical intertext.

‐ Joseph Tabbi

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Robert Arellano’s tribute to George Landow on ebr.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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A similar deconstruction of Western individualism can be found in an essay by Babak Elahi in an ebr gathering of essays from the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Dubai (2017).

‐ ebr Editor

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See George Landow’s ebr review of Jackson’s “actual” hypertext, P atchwork Girl.

‐ ebr Editor

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From the year 1999: Joseph Tabbi lamenting the lack of recognition for Gaddis (and McElroy, who was the center of a gathering on ebr in 2004).

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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For more about My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, see Will Luer’s interview with Mark Amerika or the review by David Thomas Henry Wright.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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In Illegal Literature, Roh discusses Japanese dōjinshi – comics produced by fan communities that reuse the content and styles of popular manga. Dani Spinosa, in her ebr review of Roh’s book, writes that this communal producton “promotes active (rather than passive) consumption of the literary artefact…[and] encourages a non-hierarchical community of readers who support each other as fans as well as producers.

‐ Editors

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Joseph Tabbi, editor-in-chief of the electronicbookreview, published in 2015 the biography of William Gaddis.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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this is a test peer review.

‐ Sandy Baldwin

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See also Hanjo Berressem’s exploration of Pynchon and post-9/11 fiction in … without shame or concern for etymology: 11 September in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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The term Post-Digital was carried over into the title Bloomsbury collection, as a way of contextualizing the first two decades of ebr. Eugenio Tisselli has an essay of his own, “The Heaviness of Light,” in the closing section of volume 2 of the collection.

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The two journals have collaborated actively, for example in special issues titled The Electronic Muse (1995) and Cognitive Fictions: Cognition Against Narrative (2010). Another special, on Corporate Fictions, is planned for early 2017.

‐ Joe Tabbi

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See our list of back and forths on AI: Thoughts on the Textpocalypse by Davin Heckman, a response to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s piece about the Textapocalypse in The Atlantic. In Response, Søren Bro Pold wrote his riPOSTe, Textpocalypse Now? and Davin Heckman re-riPOSted. In the meantime, John Cayley offered his own thoughts on AI and literature, which spurred a riPOSTe by Dougherty and the very first priPOSTe ever featured on ebr, written by Scott Rettberg.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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The team at the Center for Digital Narrative, including Jhave, are working on a different project: The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative. The Living Glossary is composed of two parts: AI-generated succinct definitions, and human-written explications. The glossary sits somewhere between culmination and revitalization of ReRites, a collaboration between “embodied human and disembodied algorithm.”

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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See the long-running ebr thread, titled Writing Under Constraint.

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Test Gloss. Hello World!

‐ Dibs Roy

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Steve Tomasula’s work has been written about more than he has written for ebr:

Languages of Fear in Steve Tomasula’s VAS, an Opera in Flatland

The Importance of Being Earnest in Flatland

Pierre Menard with a Pipette: VAS and the Body of Text

The Archeology of Representation: Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture

Erroneous Assumptions: Steve Tomasula’s Ascension

“You’ve never experienced a novel like this”: Time and Interaction when reading TOC

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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Check out Scott and Rod’s write up of Toxi•City in ebr from 2018.

‐ Daniel Johannes Rosnes

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For an essay that situates Curtis White’s The Middle Mind in the context of recent debates about the role of difficulty in aesthetics, see Rone Shavers’ “The End of Agapē: On Debates around Gaddis” in Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. (Ed. Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers.)

‐ Ryan Brooks