Thread: critical ecologies

From the heavens to the stars, the number three has often been tied to the occult. Carrying on this tradition, Rob Swigart has brought together three books that investigate the anomalous, address the unexplained, and answer the impossible. The truth is in here.

Beginning his review by reflecting on the book's cover art, John Bruni speculates that a punk aesthetic runs throughout Alaimo's posthuman environmentalism. Providing brief treatments of each chapter, he argues that the book's trans-corporeal understanding of the relationship between bodies and places disrupts "the very heart of what we know about ourselves."

Is 'overinterpretation' good or bad? Is it even possible, and is it ever enough? (Or are we reading too much into this?) Clint Burnham shadows Colin Davis as he traces the interventions of a "wild bunch" of critics, theorists, and philosophers, who grapple with the question of what counts as a reading of a literary text.

In his new book, Michael Wutz examines how the work of four canonical novelists - Norris, Lowry, Doctorow, and Powers - register the revolutions in 20th century media technology. Such an analysis, reviewer Joseph Conte suggests, is an important extension of Kittlerian media theory to the field of American literature.

In this review of Cary Wolfe's new essay collection, What is Posthumanism?, Neil Badmington reflects on the ebb and flow of "the posthuman" and ponders what Wolfe's work suggests for the future of the field.

Roderick Coover, Larry McCaffery, Lance Newman and Hikmet Loe explore the question of how desert ecologies are shaped through creative expression and actions. They consider, among others, how works by Edward Abbey, Robert Smithson and William T. Vollmann offer models for engaging ecological questions through writing and art.

Through a close formal analysis of two new critical collections, Paul Benzon ponders the state of media studies as field. Exploring the material and temporal paradoxes of anthologizing new media and posthumanism, he argues that "each of these texts takes shape, succeeds, and fails under the pressures and possibilities posed by the scalar demands of information."

Laura Dassow Walls explores how 'deliberative' reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.

Joseph Tabbi surveys four recent interventions into new media studies, and argues that literary critics should not forget the power of the written word to resist the circumscribed possibilities of the current mediasphere.

Paola Cavalieri challenges the book's notion that human superior ethical worth can be preserved.

Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism and
self-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military 'World
Target' that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework for
knowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.

Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding's Animate Earth and James Lovelock's recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.

Katherine Acheson's free-standing hypertext demonstrates how design
can reinforce what's said, offer a counterpoint, and, occasionally,
convey a critique of the critic.

In his review of Lee Rozelle's Ecosublime, Andrew McMurry offers a contrasting understanding of the sublime as a term describing our
closure to nature, not our openness.

Stephen J. Burn interviews fiction writer Lee Siegel.

Davis Schneiderman revisits the non-debate between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, touches on recent flare-ups in the American Book Review and the NOW WHAT blog, and reflects on the economy of book jacket blurbs.

Christopher Leise reviews Kenneth Bernard's The Man in the Stretcher and Richard Kalich's Charlie P, a work that is as much interested in the idea of the novel as it is a novel of ideas.

William Major measures academic "ecocriticism" against the practical "agrarianism" of Wendell Berry.

Author Lucy Corin opposes the emotionalism of genre fiction to the deeply emotional formalism in the fiction of Harold Jaffe, Patricia Eakins, and Janet Kauffman.

Kiki Benzon on narrative ecology and the "fradulence paradox" of Oblivion.

"Sedgwick's emphasis is on generating concepts that add to the complexity and inclusiveness of our representations, rather than trying to prescribe the right revolutionary path." Melissa Gregg reviews Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling.

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.

Charles Molesworth on style and spatial form in McElroy's Letter Left to Me, a novel whose poetic making is also an ethical growth.

Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.

Ian Demsky on Joseph McElroy's Ancient History and welcome interruptions.

Anthony Enns juxtaposes two models of German media theory in reviewing new works by Oliver Grau and Friedrich Kittler.

Sven Philipp on Cosmopolis and what seems to be a new stage in the critical reception of DeLillo.

On a posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.

Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

On Amy Elias's view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott's early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.

Lev Manovich makes the first sustained case for a new media theory, but with cinema as his starting point he has a hard time engaging the non-representational artforms and aural explorations to be found there. So argues the Australian media writer, geniwate.

Polymythic Personalistic Organicism, Biocentric Egalitarianism, and the Postmodern Return to Religion.

A revaluation and appreciation of Stanley Elkin on the occasion of the Dalkey Archive reprinting of four separate volumes.

Gene Kannenberg, Jr. finds the most well-publicized comic by one of America's most significant cartoonists to be technically accomplished, challenging as narrative but finally all too true to its title: the characters and situations in David Boring are in fact boring.

Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.

Linda Brigham offers a Deleuzean take on Independence Day.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young takes the outside perspective on German media studies.

Laura Dassow Walls reconsiders Consilience and finds E. O. Wilson to be more Christian in outlook than the Reverend William Whewell, who originated the term, 'consilience'

Jan van Looy reviews Silvio Gaggi on hypertext fiction up to the early '90s.

Joseph Tabbi identifies a shift in U.S. criticism that has taken place in the eight years separating Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe and John Johnston's Information Multiplicity.

Luc Herman reviews the collection, Cyberspace Textuality by Marie-Laure Ryan, and warns against the creation of a false dichotomy between the digital and traditional print text.

Linda Brigham reads How We Became Posthuman the way Katherine Hayles reads novels: as a story that resists both linearity and the analytical ardor of attempts at humanist ordering.

Luca Di Blasi reads Peter Sloterdijk straight.
Translation by Chris Thomas

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young gets inside De Landa's total history.

John Cayley reviews the Hypertext '97 Conference, which brought together representatives from corporate and academic sectors.

Steven Kellert on being "in favor of universals."

Poets Take On Guess Inc.: Poets Win

Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.

Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.

Piotr Siemion discusses Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Carol Stabile reviews Our Stolen Future.

Paisley Livingston on Stanislaw Lem and the history and philosphy of Virtual Reality.

An art installation as much as an "issue," the original site for ebr4, Critical Ecologies, used variations on a concrete poem by Daniel Wenk to guide readers through the "green" and "gray" essays. Another innovation was the introduction of the riposte section.

Matthew Fuller on The Cyborg Handbook.

Linda Brigham reviews Incorporations, the most recent collection from Zone Books.

Joseph Tabbi and Gregory Ulmer discuss what intellectual work will be like in the new electracy.

David Cassuto reviews Wild Ideas, a collection of ecocritical essays.

In this feature essay from the spring of 1996, Michael Bérubé claimed that left intellectuals have little choice but to sell out, if they want to make a difference in the culture they critique.
But which way is out? And who gets to go public?

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.