critical ecologies

Laura Dassow Walls explores how 'deliberative' reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.

Bruce Clarke reviews Joseph Caroll's Literary Darwinism and (like Laura Walls in her review of E.O. Wilson ten years earlier in ebr)identifies the LD project not as "consilience" so much as the
colonization of the literary humanities by one branch of the biological sciences. In Caroll, Clarke discerns a Darwinian fundamentalism to match the Christian fundamentalism that can be observed in Clarke's own Lubbock, TX habitat.

John Durham Peters outlines "the media studies triangle," which consists of textual, social, and institutional approaches. He then stakes out another approach that considers what civilization itself has at stake in media change.

Joseph Tabbi surveys four recent interventions into new media studies, and argues that literary critics should not forget the power of the written word to resist the circumscribed possibilities of the current mediasphere. This review also appears in the Summer 2008 issue (Vol. 49, no. 2) of Contemporary Literature. The works under review include: The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory by Thomas Foster; My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles; Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America by Martin Kevorkian; Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Jon Adams rifles through the instrument cabinet of the man upstairs by way of William J. Jackson's Heaven's Fractal Net. Adams finds more problems than solutions in Jackson's position that fractals are a fundamental and universal structure of life - a position Jackson stakes out by vacillating between scholarly proof and speculative guruism.