Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media

Again, while this is fine and correct praise for Kirschenbaum’s method and its achievements, in this book, it also reminds us, perhaps, of the ethico-critical problem posed by Foucault’s discursive histories, in their basically descriptive restriction to the *partial* world enclosed by Euro-Atlantic modernity. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s early analysis (in the widely cited essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) of the consequences of Foucault’s refusal of ideology critique remains apposite here, as does the engagement with technology and media studies throughout her work.