Agreeing that translation studies does well to address questions of transcoding, Nick Montfort further extends the project advocated by Maria Mencia, Soeren Pold, Manuel Portela (and our first respondent, Belgian Poet Laueate Jan Baetans). A look at explorations of the topic in early e-lit turns up longstanding interests in the translinguistic, transcreational, the metrical, material, and contextual. Montfort offers this itemization not just to enlarge a specific list and topology for translation studies, but to show that the concept of literary translation almost certainly needs to be exploded and reworked.

In a paper presented at the “Arabic Electronic Literature" conference in Dubai (February, 2018), N. Katherine Hayles considers born digital writing as a cognitive assemblage of technical devices and readerly, interpretive activity.

Indirectly responding to Callus's and Aquilina's essay, Anna Nacher finds a 14th way of describing e-literature: employing the Deleuzean concept of a minor style.

This essay has been reprinted from the journal CounterText (2.2) by permission of Edinburgh University Press.

In response to Baetans's essay, David Roh sees an occasion for moving digital literary studies beyond the archive toward a a living repository of anarchistic, ongoing communitarian activity with a "resurgent cultural impact."

A post-humanist critique of Rockwell and Berendt's all too Humanist essay, in the vein of Donna Haraway’s “Keeping with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene” (2016) and Patricia MacCormack’s “Posthuman Ethics” (2012).

In response to Mencia, Pold, and Portela, Belgian poet and scholar Jan Baetans suggests that we might view the field of trans-medial literature as an offshoot of translation studies (and not the reverse). In any case, whether we approach e-lit from a medial or linguistic standpoint, scholars do well to observe a "merger of translation and adaptation studies."

A first draft of this essay was presented at the 2017 ELO Conference at Porto, in a panel organized by the "Nar-Trans" group of the University of Granada.

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.

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."

"[T]ranslation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other." (Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" [1921])

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."

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.

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

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).