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.

Paola Cavalieri challenges the book's notion that human superior ethical worth can be preserved.

One of a series of eco-critical reviews, Stephen Dougherty explores the new ways that "matter is made to matter" in Ira Livingston's writing on science and literature. The payoff of an ecocriticism grounded in the materiality of language itself, can bee seen by the strong political positioning toward the end of Dougherty's essay.

Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism and self-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military 'World
Target' that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework for knowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.

Andrew McMurry looks back on ten years of ecocriticism and identifies
a "new physiocracy," whose exclusive interest in technology is no better than the exclusive valuation of property that typified physiocrats of the Nineteenth-Century.

Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding's Animate Earth and James Lovelock's recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.