fictions present

Ralph Clare reviews After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus.

Berry, who with ebr editor Joseph Tabbi initiated the Fictions Present thread (circa 2006), finds few intersections of that project with Hungerford’s celebrated Making Literature Now, not least because Hungerford shows little interest in the question of how her titular concept, when applied to commercial and cultural productions, indie and alt endeavors, “manages to mean what those trying to make literature are trying to make.” 

In this review of Rethinking the New Medievalism, Matt Cohen ponders the significance of philology's ongoing period of "reflection, [...] refraction, and revisitation." Against the backdrop of contemporary shifts in the humanities, more generally, Cohen sees opportunities for medievalists to intervene, bringing with them both clarity and innovation to fields in a state of fluctuation.

Andrew Lindquist reviews Michael LeMahieu's Fictions of Fact and Value, examining the influence of logical positivism on American literature of the postwar era.

In his review of Martin Paul Eve’s Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno, Julius Greve situates this new book on Pynchon within the upheavals produced by speculative realism and contemporary discourses on materialism. In doing so, Greve reminds us of what was always already the case: the literary-philosophical relevance of Pynchon, which turns out to be all the more inescapable in contemporary political climates.

Adam Pilkey argues that the ARG Year Zero's use of "revealing noise" allows and encourages the audience to help in the building of the narrative by becoming participants in a conspiracy theory within the ARG. Pilkey argues that "The Presence" found in the Nine Inch Nails album and corresponding ARG, Year Zero, symbolizes and denies a truth, which in turn provides a means that furthers the resources that constructs conspiracy theories in this alternate reality.

Kate Pullinger's response to Curtis White's "The Latest Word" ploughs ahead. She tells us that writers today may fear for the future of literature but they keep writing, they go on, they must go on.

In The American Epic Novel, Gilbert Adair presents a "State-of-the-Empire address" that interrogates the epical form in a time where authors no longer talk of writing "The Great American Novel." As Joseph Tabbi finds, such an exploration goes beyond expanding the canon and presents "a new, compelling context for 'the literary' itself."

Richard Kalich's latest protagonist is Richard Kalich, but one critic views this postmodern occupation of the novel as an opportunity - even an encouragement - to forget about him.

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, while simultaneously using the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.