newsletter

Welcome to version 7.0 of the electronic book review. The changes that have taken place have been in motion for many months, and we at ebr would like to extend our gratitude to the electronic literature community (the ELO as well as unique members and groups) for their support and collaboration in launching our new and improved version. We built 7.0 in the particular hope that ebr will offer a more engaged and dynamic platform through which to discuss and share digitally informed texts of the past and present, so you will notice some new features: for instance, “from the archive” pulls up publ… continue

Dialogues abound in ebr’s July 2018 publications. Jan Baetens’ essay “Photo Narratives and Digital Archives; or: The Film Photo Novel Lost and Found” explores the “rogue” archival practices online that can recover and aid research of “lost” media such as the film photo novel. In David Roh’s riPOSTe to Baetens, he suggests that perhaps rogue environments of archival research, which foster community and cultural dialogue, expand notions of the archive and could be called differently as respository. Thinking about data as something collective, cultural, and community based, Brian Schram and Jenni… continue

In response to last month’s review of Chris Kraus’ After Kathy Acker (2017), we welcome a riPOSTe by Daniel Schulz, who is currently working as part of the University of Cologne’s Kathy Acker archive. Schulz’s response to reviewer Ralph Clare explores the dynamic between Acker’s personal life and politics. We also publish Dale Enggass’ “Vibrant Wreckage,” which explores how Jane Bennett’s new materialist approach in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009) can be used to examine non-human positions in both canonical texts (Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick) and newer texts (Pamela Lu’s A… continue

This May, ebr offers three posts that negotiate the relationship between utterance and silence: two riPOSTes to Joseph McElroy’s essay “Forms of Censorship; Censorship as Form” (originally published in ebr in February 2018), and a review of After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. Max Nestelieiev responds to McElroy by examining the impact of Soviet-era censorship on writers: the emergence of the “half-intellectual,” the figure of a self-censored writer whose work arguably became indecipherable and even invaluable for understanding the control of Soviet-era socialism. David Thomas Henry Wright… continue

This is not a prank. In the spirit of the idea that April 1 is the one day of the year that netizens are especially careful in judging what they read on the Internet, electronic book review offers new approaches to familiar topics that deserve taking a second look. This month, Hannes Bergthaller offers an essay that extends ebr’s necessarily ongoing conversations on the relationships among text, media, and nature—for instance, in our Critical Ecologies thread. Bergthaller’s “Beyond Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems” is soon to be part of a gathering-in-process on Nat… continue