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

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

Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Hello, my name is Lai-Tze Fan. Today, I make my first post as an Associate Editor of ebr—and for this, I owe much thanks to Davin Heckman (for recommending me) and Joseph Tabbi (for brainstorming with me). * Much has happened since the last public post, including an annual congregation in July at ELO 2017 in Porto, Portugal, as well as our welcoming of Will Luers as our new Managing Editor of the ebr site. As I reflect upon some of the events in these last few months, I am thinking of some of what is to come in the communities of ebr, ELO, as well as… continue