Three recent poetry publications by Nate Dorward's press The Gig are reviewed by Greg Betts; these are not poems so much as environments outside of, perhaps astride, the contingencies of systems.

Mike Barrett evaluates Steve Tomasula's The Book of Portraiture in terms of its place between tradition and artistic innovation in the 21st century.

Stephen Hawkins engages with the "web of counterintuitive, paradoxical, contentious and yet important claims" that he identifies in Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs.

Geneviève Brassard defends Gerald Graff's original approaches in Clueless in Academe against his critics - for the problem with Graff's book does not lie between the covers but rather between the ears of those who fault him excessively for sins of omission and commission.

One of a series of eco-critical reviews, Stephen Dougherty explores the new ways that "matter is made to matter" in Ira Livingston's writing on science and literature. The payoff of an ecocriticism grounded in the materiality of language itself, can bee seen by the strong political positioning toward the end of Dougherty's essay.

As Christian Moraru argues here that the new is still the objective in contemporary writing. But writers and artists make it by making it anew rather than new ("Get it used," Andrei Codrescu invites us), a new not so much novel as renovated, reframed and reproduced rather than produced, which by the same token redefines and advertises authorship as deliberate plagiarism.

Rob Swigart's "Seeking" is a clever and funny story whose roots lie in the materialization of internet interdating connections. Moving through the technological and media reductions of desire, Swigart parallels the overarching theme of "seeking" with a form that is itself punctuated with questions.

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.