critical ecologies
A Strange Metapaper on Computing Natural Language
Without anonymous peer review, there can be no formal recognition of literary scholarship, and ebr is no exception. That said, our journal looks for occasions to turn our confidential reports into public riPOSTes, if the reviewer is so inclined. In this essay, our colleagues from Coimbra, Manuel Portela and Ana Marques da Silva, stage reflections on the peer reviews that their own scholarly work has generated, in earlier submissions to other peer review outlets. The "metapaper" that results, is a further step in the initiative not to do away with peer review, but to bring the process into the public sphere.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Electronic Literature, or, A Print Essai on Tone in Electronic Literature, 1.0
This essay has been reprinted from the journal CounterText (2.2) by permission of Edinburgh University Press.
Vibrant Wreckage: Salvation and New Materialism in Moby-Dick and Ambient Parking Lot
Instead of simply reviewing Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (Duke 2010), author Dale Enggass applies Bennett's "Political Ecology of Things" to longstanding (and not yet resolved) themes of salvation, materialism and transcendence in Melville's Moby-Dick and Pamela Lu's Ambient Parking Lot.
Decollage of an Iconic Image
Even as the first biography of Kathy Acker appears, we have word of a newly assembled Acker archive in Cologne, under the curatorship of Daniel Schulz. The gist of which, could be to re-orient Acker's personal relationships to "the politics inherent in Acker's life."
Author and Auto-censorship
Max Nestelieiev responds to Joseph McElroy’s recent ebr essay, exploring how Soviet control enforced onto writers a self-censorship for which their work paid the price.
Self-Aware Self-Censorship As Form
A dedicated, elaborated thought stream from an author who, like McElroy, has read and thought about the presence of censorship (as theme and experience) in novels by Ross Gibson, Shariar Mandinipour,J. .M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Mark Z Danielewski, Italo Calvino, and Fernando Pessoa. Author David Thomas Henry Wright explores the (loss of) authority of the literary novel in a time of "networked glut" while at the same time seeking trans-national, trans-historical, photographic, multi-medial and inter-generational "alliances" that might redress contemporary censorship and "deeply shape (or erode) contemporary literature."
Beyond Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems
Bergthaller's essay originally appeared in the collection, Ecological Thought in Germany. It is reprinted here, with permissions from Lexington Books, as part of an ebr gathering on Natural Media (December 2019).
Thinking With the Planet: a Review of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century
Using recent events of planetary significance as a point of departure, Jeanette McVicker reviews The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru.
A Riposte to Jeanette McVicker’s Thinking With the Planet
In response to Jeanette McVicker's review of The Planetary Turn, John Bruni examines what it means to theorize a sense of the planetary.
Review of Williams’s How to be an Intellectual
In this review of How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University, Christopher Findeisen analyzes Jeffrey J. Williams's assessment of higher education in the United States. Linking the decline of funding for universities and colleges, rising student debt, the exploitation of academic labor, and the digital humanities, the review examines the omission of accounts of "the not-so-remarkable everyperson academic, the untenured, the up-and-comers, and the downtrodden."