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and how the defining traits of that movement have managed to—or failed to—translate into whatever we decide has superseded it in today’s postcolonial, posthumanist, and digital culture.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

A few years before the Electronic Book Review was launched, the late Umberto Eco, addressing a symposium on the future of the book at the University of San Marino, made use of a familiar allegory. This was the story of Thoth and the invention of writing, and he told it as a way of prefacing his enthusiasm (as opposed to a general despair in the broader public) for the emerging correspondent modes reading and thinking. Then, as now, our vantage point is liminal, a Duchampian infra-thin in which one age (the age of the book) is transitioning into another (the age of the screen). It’s been 60 yea… continue