avant garde

Taking recent writings-of-internet as test cases, Stuart Moulthrop demonstrates the folly of deploying modernist compositional models, even avant-garde theories of citational and conceptual poetry recently popularized by Kenneth Goldsmith and the Flarf poets, to read born-digital writing. Though it may be fun, it's ultimately futile to interpret the contingent output of an "interface in process" as a poem existing in a fixed, terminable state. Perhaps, then, interfacing with databases is becoming integral to not just electronic literature and digital poetics but all forms of literary study and practice?

Jhave's wide-ranging history and prospectus alerts us to cognitive, material, and mythic dimensions of the nexus of image and text. By showing how text evolved into image, the essay traces a new malleability, dimensionality, and embodiment of writing. The contemporary image-text is a quasi-object with experimental literary qualities as well as an almost organic media dynamism.

Further on Gertrude Stein, Carole Maso, and the avant garde in U.S. fiction from Lidia Yuknavitch.

Larry McCaffery reframes his 1989 essay on the "postmodern turn" in rock'n'roll music.

Late Breaking: William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Rob Wittig post from Notre Dame University on the &Now festival of writers and writing.

On Joseph McElroy's Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract but
evocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) as
those ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.

This review of Ralph Berry's novel Frank and the subsequent exchange between the authors, appeared in the March/April 2006 and July/August 2006 issues of The American Book Review.

R M Berry Replies to Joseph Tabbi