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.

What does it mean to apply a "critical" lens to programming code? Members of the CCS Working Group grapple with this and other foundational questions, hashing out the methods, boundaries, and stakes of a new academic field. This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion.

Timothy Morton offers a critical reading of Roderick Coover's video Canyonlands: Edward Abbey and the Defense of Wilderness. In the video's stark modernist form, Morton writes, "the hydroelectric engine of human progress still hums." What's needed now, he suggests, is a "Goth remix."

Daniel Worden's riposte to Sean O'Sullivan's piece on Deadwood argues that O'Sullivan's "formalist account does not acknowledge... Deadwood's connection to a kind of historical necessity that governs not just the show's characters but also the very structure of the show as a historical drama about the West on late twentieth-century cable."

Sean O'Sullivan explores numerous aspects of narrative and seriality in his examination of the HBO series Deadwood, created by David Milch. O'Sullivan argues that Deadwood often resists seriality's dictates and conventions by adhering to, amongst other structures, Aristotlelian dramatic principles that are by nature at odds with seriality's essence. This is but one example of the existence of an "internal constriction" that "pushes against some of the conventions of television serials by denying...

In this piece - part introduction, part artist's statement - Whitney Anne Trettien reflects on her "combinatory" approach to the history of "text-generating mechanisms."

Christopher Douglas argues that within the fictional world of the popular online game World of Warcraft, race is not understood as being socially constructed, but rather as a biological fact, "composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences," and thus perpetuates the old-fashioned "notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are."

David Golumbia's response to Brian Lennon's "Gaming the System."

Abish's Alphabetical Africa is pondered here, in a critifiction by Louis Bury. Bury's text is written - like the novel itself - under constraint: each critical query begins with a new letter of the alphabet. Culminating in "Zeugma," the essay explores the poetics of Abish's linguistic experiment from somewhere close to the inside. (Doug Nufer's Negativeland gets a similar - though more subtle - treatment in another Bury piece.)

Examining Doug Nufer's Negativeland, a constraint-based text, Louis Bury adopts the same constraint as the novel - an approach NOT dissimilar to his treatment of Abish's Alphabetical Africa. In this case, the constraint is a prohibition against sentences lacking "some form of negation" - a commitment not unlike the affirmation of negativity.

An international group of digital fiction scholars proposes a platform of critical principles, seeking to build the foundation for a truly "digital" approach to literary study.

R.M. Berry responds to Brian Lennon and Loren Glass by noting the crucial differences between the various forms of institutionalization that are endemic (or should be considered so) to their conversations on "The System."

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.

Countering the persistent popular notion that electronic literature is just reading the classics under glass, Daniel Punday advocates for greater innovation, and more authorial autonomy, at the level of book design. Insisting on "authors' rights to design the interface through which readers encounter their books," Punday argues that digital book publishing should strive to emulate the medial status of games, "which remain messy individuals."

Brian Lennon weighs in on developing conversation about Mark McGurl's Program Era; Lennon's response to Loren Glass's riposte argues that Bourdieu's work is invoked by Glass as an answer, not a question, "without any effort to mark...why or how Bourdieu might be right - and without leaving any sense of the debates that generated and refined Bourdieu's positions."

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."

Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer "ping trace" can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation.

Loren Glass argues that Brian Lennon’s review of The Program Era is a “symptom of the very crisis he so ruthlessly anatomizes.” Glass suggests Lennon’s review exaggerates the anti-institutional quality of Mark McGurl’s work while displaying its own anti-institutional bias against naming “the System” it describes.

Taking seriously author Gary Hall's ground-up rethinking of the university, David Parry raises an issue not addressed in Digitize This Book, namely - what if Hall's own field of Cultural Studies has no future as a discipline in the university's digital future?

Sandy Baldwin explores the distinctions between non-digital poetry, digital poetry, and e-literature in general, and considers whether or not such distinctions are ultimately untenable.