The title of this special gathering describes a digital poetics of the nation state that is currently known as Canada; however, the Editors and authors of this issue wish to acknowledge that this land is made up of over 630 First Nation communities, representing more than 50 nations and 50 Indigenous languages. This special gathering’s description of a “Canadian digital poetics” is for the purpose of consistency and not the homogeneity of these diverse communities, nations, and languages, which we do not take for granted. The Editors, Dani Spinosa and Lai-Tze Fan, additionally acknowledge that… continue

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as… continue

It seems strange during pandemic-induced isolation to reflect on last summer’s ELO2019 gathering, the first time the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference and media arts festival was hosted in Ireland. It was a privilege for all at University College Cork to welcome so many scholars, practitioners and colleagues to our campus and city, a privilege that is only magnified now that same cohort is unable to convene in Orlando, Florida for ELO2020. The editors of this special issue would like it dedicated to ELO2020 organisers, whose labour is seen and valued. This collection of es… continue

“Natural media” re-valuates the communicative potential of natural spaces, especially in instances where symbolic import collides with raw matter in a manner that hides from, disguises, or elides stark reality. It considers intersections, collisions, tensions, opportunities, and affordances that arise in the discussion of “Natural Media,” both broadly conceived and in its contributors’ particular areas of research. This collection emerges from a panel hosted by the Modern Language Association’s MS Forum on Visual Media in 2017. The co-editors, Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Dean Rasmussen, first met… continue

This gathering is unique. What differentiates it from other gatherings on the electronic book review is that rather than being compiled and united via subject matter, what unites these papers is that they were all first delivered at the Arabic E-lit Conference in Dubai which took place in February 2018. The publication of conference proceedings may not be particularly innovative. In this way, the gathering works to “Mind the Gap” in the scholarship surrounding electronic literature, providing open access to conference papers that the scheduling and finances of travelling may have made inaccess… continue

Toward the end of William Gaddis’s novel of American capitalism, J R (1975), a truck passes by on a Manhattan Street displaying five dwarves who are house painters and the words, “None of Us Grew but the Business.” At the time of publication, readers might have taken this phrase and Gaddis’s novel itself, as a corporate satire: one that traces (in grueling detail), the construction of a multi-billion-dollar empire by a solitary pre-adolescent, J R van Sant, who owns and operates a conglomerate from his grade school payphone. A handkerchief that he’d put over the mouthpiece makes him sound ‘big… continue

In the context of the 1990s, there are three writers to whom the phrase “electronic literature, c’est moi” could conceivably apply: Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, and Shelley Jackson. In particular, afternoon, a story, Victory Garden, and Patchwork Girl were generative works that exerted outsize influence both within and beyond the genre.1 The scale of proliferation that accompanied and followed this period, however, in tandem with the rapid commercialization of the Internet, was something few predicted. Issues of monetization, open access, how to define electronic literature, whether hypert… continue

Vienna Now! Recent literary studies such as Mark Taylor’s Rewiring the Real (read Vanwesenbeeck’s review); Michael LeMahieu’s Fictions of Fact and Value; and the volume Wittgenstein and Modernism (edited by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and LeMahieu), have ushered in a return to logical positivism in literary studies, more than two decades after the perceived impasse between continental and analytical philosophy (as captured in the historical stand-off between Derrida and Searle) seemed to have been decisively settled in favor of the former (read Kellert’s essay and Michaels’ essay). Perhaps not… continue

In June of 2015 at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, the “What [in the World] was Postmodernism?” Symposium brought together scholars, poets, and media artists to reflect on how postmodernism has shaped their respective fields and practices, and how the defining traits of that movement have managed to—or failed to—translate into whatever we decide has superseded it in today’s postcolonial, posthumanist, and digital culture. Scholars interrogated how we might deconstruct or reconstruct the phenomenon of the postmodern—as a style, philosophy, or era, among other possibilities—alon… continue

This special gathering of ebr aims to re-frame the conversation about digital and natural ecologies in two important ways. It does so firstly by refusing to indulge in post-apocalyptic speculation. And secondly, in contrast to the large-scale rhetoric that associates technology—all of it, but particularly digital technology—with the “End Times,” it seeks to examine the ways that digital technology is, already, participating in environmental discourse, neither as an agent of ecological devastation nor a figure of salvation. Instead, the essays in this special gathering demonstrate the ways that… continue