newsletter

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

This month at ebr, we release an essay by Gordon Calleja on narrative indie games and a review by Ralph M. Berry on Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now. We are also reprinting an interview between Mark Amerika and the late Adrian Miles, in celebration of his contributions and his memory. * First, we re-print an experimental essay called “13 Ways of Looking at Electronic Literature,” by the University of Malta’s Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus. The essay first appeared in 2016 in CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary, and makes an appearance in ebr for its range of histori… continue

ebr publishes two essays this month that ask tough questions about censorship and that inquire into transmedial narrative experiences. A quick announcement (and hearty congratulations!): the Critical Code Studies Working Group—organized by Mark C. Marino, Jeremy Douglass, Catherine Griffiths, Ali Rachel Pearl, and Teddy Roland—will complete its 2018 online “think tank” on February 5. Participants have been plenty and discussions have been rich; the CCSWG 2018 website becomes a valuable resource for those in the e-literature community, as well as for researchers, teachers, and enthusiasts who c… continue

Happy new year! We at EBR wish you all the best in 2018. This month, we publish reviews by Gregor Baszak and Leiya Lee. Baszak’s observations of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies are timely: his musing “reconsideration of the Internet” occurs in the midst of recent political debates about net neutrality, for instance. Lee’s  review of Akira Mizuta Lippit’s text Cinema Without Reflection offers a reflective, counter-reflective, Derridean theory of cinema. * Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017) foregrounds political controvers… continue

This month, we’re delighted to publish two pieces that complement each other through a mutual focus on intellectual property. Dani Spinosa’s review of David S. Roh’s Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity (2015) and the essay “Information Wants to be Free, Or Does It?: The Ethics of Datafication,” by Geoffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt, both deal with the treatment of content in an age of information. We are also delighted to hear from digital artist and scholar Jhave Johnston; Jhave was kind enough to respond to Theadora Walsh’s review of his book Aesthetic Animism (MIT Press, 2… continue