Katherine Hayles uses Steve Tomasula's multimodal TOC for a significant engagement with the temporal processuality of complex technical beings. Drawing on Bergon's "duration" and its elaboration in recent theories of technicity and consciousness, Hayles explores the complex temporal enfoldings of living and technical beings, showing that Tomasula's new media novel narrates and materially embodies such assemblages.

Steve Tomasula's TOC is hard to explain, according to Alison Gibbons. You're better off experiencing it in all its multimodal and multimedial complexity. Using human computer interaction and narrative theory, Gibbons shows that the emergent, singular, fractured temporality of reading TOC raises the bar for the new media book.

Stephen Ramsay introduces a short film in which he does a live reading of composer Andrew Sorensen's performance "Strange Places" and provides commentary.

David Shepard heads off the discussion regarding Stephen Ramsay's live reading of Andrew Sorensen's "Strange Places." His initial contribution is followed with posts by Amanda French, Mark Marino, Max Feinstein, Jeremy Douglass, Daren Chapin, John Bell, Jeff Nyoff, Jennifer Lieberman, and Stephen Ramsay, as well as Andrew Sorensen himself.

This formulation by Joseph Tabbi is being reprinted with permission from the University of Minnesota Press's remixthebook. The original online version can be found here.

In this riposte, Marie-Laure Ryan suggests Lisa Swanstrom has 'flattened' the dimensions of her arguments about digital narrative as well as the dimensions of the digital experience itself.

In The American Epic Novel, Gilbert Adair presents a "State-of-the-Empire address" that interrogates the epical form in a time where authors no longer talk of writing "The Great American Novel." As Joseph Tabbi finds, such an exploration goes beyond expanding the canon and presents "a new, compelling context for 'the literary' itself."

In an increasingly monolingual, globalized world, the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection may just offer a map of the territory. The question the reviewer, John Zuern, poses is how do we navigate this terrain going forward?

Just when you thought you were used to electronic literature, this critic makes the case for "beyond the screen" with a review of Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla's book of the same title, focusing on "transformations of literary structures, interfaces and genre."

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.

Too much about too little, and too little about too much. Reviewing the new critical collection Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives, this critic finds evidence of overproduction in the "Pyndustry."

Jussi Parikka interviews artist Zoe Beloff about her relationship to the emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies known as media archaeology. In way of response, Beloff discusses some past works, including: Lost (1995), Shadow Land (2000), Claire and Don in Slumberland (2002), Charming Augustine (2005), The Somnambulists (2008), and The Dream Films (2009).

How does a sample of de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater give birth to a mutant, six-fingered hand? This essay articulates the logic of Noon's 2001 experiment in constrained writing, which concretizes the play of signal and noise, pattern and randomness, in the flow of information. In the process, the critic suggests, Noon dramatizes how printed texts rupture and reassemble when they are transferred to electronic media.

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, while simultaneously using the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.

Reviewing the week's discussion of Programmed Visions, Sarah Zurhellen finds a pleasurable respite that, necessarily, generated as many questions as answers.

In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's "On Sourcery and Source Codes," the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun's psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible.

In this review Veronica Vold charts the posthuman environmental ethic in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and notes how the text draws together issues of race, (dis)ability, and the environment in a way that disrupts the boundaries between bodies and places.

Gregg Biglieri offers some advice on reading McElroy: jettison one's habitual grammars and adopt the grammars of time and timing. Become an expert in sound. Become all ear.

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.

Citing the narrator's radical ambivalence about time, history, and the flesh, Maureen Curtin argues that American Genius, A Comedy represents the hysteria of the contemporary "post-political" moment.