newsletter

Happy new year! This month, we publish our final instalment of the 4-part series on the metainterface—“a reconsideration of interface studies.” Scott Rettberg and Shelley Jackson’s “Room for So Much World,” is a special conversation with celebrated writer Jackson, detailing her experiments with writing mediums (including fresh snow and skin) and with materiality/language in more classic forms (see her newest novel Riddance). “Room for So Much World” anticipates themes in a forthcoming ebr gathering, Natural Media, edited by Editors Eric Dean Rasmussen and Lisa Swanstrom. Please look forward to… continue

This December, ebr has eight publications to share! We have the pleasure of publishing select essays from the Arabic E-lit Conference in Dubai (February 2018), starting with N. Katherine Hayles’ “Literary Texts as Cognitive Assemblages: The Case of Electronic Literature” (published in ebr in August 2018). As the editor of this gathering, Dani Spinosa introduces these texts in her note “Essays from the Arabic E-lit Conference.” I encourage reading Spinosa’s thoughtful introduction. Including Hayles’ work, the five essays of the gathering are Reham Hosny’s “Mapping Electronic Literature in the A… continue

Resuming from last month, ebr will continue to publish texts that reflect upon the politics of the metainterface, as well as cultural practices and works that have emerged in response, starting with last month’s re-publication of a chapter of Christian Ulrik Anderson and Søren Bro Pold’s The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities and Clouds (MIT 2018). This month, we feature a discussion from Rod Coover and Scott Rettberg on their project Toxi•City: A Climate Change Narrative, a narrative film that combines fictional and nonfictional stories of people affected by rising sea levels and rec… continue

This month’s publication initiates an exciting 4-part assemblage—one of a series initiated with ebr version 7.0, on the topic of “metainterfaces,” a term from Christian Ulrik Anderson and Søren Bro Pold’s new text The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities and Clouds (MIT 2018). Over several months, ebr will publish texts that reflect upon the politics of the metainterface, as well as cultural practices and works that have emerged in response. In the spirit of these and similar relational series that ebr version 7.0 is proud to offer, please look forward to forthcoming gatherings, includi… continue

The publications of September are preceded with several exciting announcements. I write this monthly post after having returned from ELO 2018 in Montréal, Canada—five days and nights of critical discussion, creative exhibition, and much-needed reunion in the city of microbreweries and cheese. We hope to see you at the 2019 Meeting of the ELO in Cork, Ireland, from July 15-17! Many congratulations to the winners of the 2018 ELO prizes: – the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature was awarded to Will Luers (ebr’s own Managing Editor), Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean for their work N… continue

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