This new thread, edited by Henry Turner and introduced by Joseph Tabbi, presents in short order what scholars today in the field of literature, science, and the arts are reading and viewing. Some of the citations appear online, and by 'enfolding' these references, ebr intends to build a profile of the field as it evolves, available to ebr readers for further annotation and construction.

A snapshot of items on Joseph Tabbi's desktops, vertical and
horizontal, presented at the Chicago meeting of the Modern Language Association in December 2007.

Surveying the decline of adventure as a culturally relevant theme, Steffen Hantke argues that Tom LeClair's Passing Trilogy finds new ways of revalidating adventure for a millennial world of bourgeois security and moderation.

Countering Andrew Gallix's suggestion in The Guardian that electronic literature is finished, author Dene Grigar indicates that it may not be e-lit, but rather the institution of humanities teaching, that is in a state of crisis - and e-lit in fact could be well placed one to revive the teaching of literature in schools and universities.

Eric Dean Rasmussen introduces a gathering of twelve essays on literary resistances that imagine how a materially engaged and affectively attuned literary culture might play a more transformative role in the emergent network society.

Marco Abel reads recent affect theory and suggests, via discussions of fiction by Don DeLillo, Brian Evenson, and Cormac McCarthy, how literature can cultivate the reader's receptivity to these pre-subjective bodily forces.

Dave Ciccoricco reviews Michael Joyce's novel of network culture, Was. Seeing an inversion of Russian formalism in Joyce's work, Ciccoricco explores how Joyce's novel attempts to "reconcile the polylinguistic, stylistic, and ludic difficulty" of the text with an "affinity for the quotidian."

Emily Short interrogates Ian Bogost's Unit Operations and finds his approach to videogame criticism too capacious in its attempt to account for a variety of expressive media, and too narrow in its focus on low-order choices in videogames.

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. This review also appears in the Summer 2008 issue (Vol. 49, no. 2) of Contemporary Literature. The works under review include: The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory by Thomas Foster; My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles; Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America by Martin Kevorkian; Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Bruno Arich-Gerz reports from Munich on International Pynchon Week, 2008. Finding a retreat to traditional reading strategies, Arich-Gerz wonders whether we have lost more than we gained in the turn against theory.

John Limon surveys the boundaries of the global novel in this review of John Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World and Naomi Klein's Fences and Windows. Limon traces the trajectory of plot, character, and argument in the genre, as he reads "perhaps the first great global novel."

Stephen Schryer contrasts narratological and postsecular readings of postmodernism in a review of Gerhard Hoffmann's vast study, From Modernsism to Postmodernism (2005), and John McClure's narrower but more pointed exploration, Partial Faiths (2007).

Recorded by Joseph Tabbi. A week in the life of the artist.