Gloss on Electronic Literature: Where Is It?
Dave Ciccoricco
February 5, 2009
P:nth-child(10)
In fact, it would be entirely logical to suggest that elit might even resuscitate reading, given the fact that it inhabits the places most likely to accommodate reading in a digital culture: screens. As Michael Joyce said memorably, “hypertext is the word’s revenge on TV” (1995, 47).
Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media
Brian Lennon
February 4, 2009
P:nth-child(17)
One reason, perhaps, to discontinue “speaking of a specifically American literary tradition uniquely suited to the critique of technology and modernity” might be to withdraw the license this provides, *even as a critical diagnosis,* for further inward-gazing appropriations of the sort this essay elsewhere so articulately resists. Is it really unthinkable that the entire intellectual tradition of U.S. exceptionalism, in all of its right, liberal, and leftish versions, will someday be decisively shadowed by imperial decline?
Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media
Brian Lennon
February 4, 2009
P:nth-child(9)
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.
Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media
Brian Lennon
February 4, 2009
P:nth-child(6)
Regarding the demand for “close attention to what’s stable and continuous”: The point is a solid one, of course. But I wonder if this emphasis on progressive continuity doesn’t sit at some odds with a recent turn to figures of cyclic or folded temporality, in U.S.-based new media literary and cultural studies (Gitelman, *Always Already New;* Acland, *Residual Media;* Zielinski et al., *Deep Time of the Media;* Funkhouser, *Prehistoric Digital Poetry*…) — and with what one might read from that turn, perhaps, as a newly self-conscious and justly sensitive form of temporizing attention to the… continue
Gloss on Tom LeClair’s Passing Trilogy: Recovering Adventure in the Age of Post-Genre
Joseph Tabbi
January 31, 2009
P:nth-child(6)
Melley’s term “agency panic,” presented in his 2008 and 2005 ebr contributions, is an alternative to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “anxiety of obsolescence” (as discussed by Anthony Enns).
Gloss on The Unit Is in the Eye of the Beholder
Rob Swigart
December 14, 2008
P:nth-child(38)
Not to be confused with my interactive novel Portal (1986) from Activision.
Gloss on The Unit Is in the Eye of the Beholder
Rob Swigart
December 14, 2008
P:nth-child(17)
We see this point in action in the comments on the game Budget Hero she mentions in the previous paragraph.
Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media
Lori Emerson
November 10, 2008
P:nth-child(21)
While this critique is true perhaps of Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer, a wider sample of Hayles’s work – especially her most recent collection of essays Electronic Literature – reveals just this kind of use of the literary to read the technological. In Electronic Literature Hayles urges us to read electronic literature not as reflecting but rather “reflecting upon the media from which it springs” (88).
Gloss on GRIOT’s Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System
D. Fox Harrell
October 12, 2008
P:nth-child(5)
The gloss provided by Ben Underwood echoes, rather than disputes, the approach taken in the work described here. Various critiques of the capacity of computing technologies to represent many everyday aspects of human cognition, much less consciousness, are well known. The work here acknowledges such limitations and embraces critical perspectives of AI such as provided by Searle, Winograd and Flores, Agre, and others. The goal of the GRIOT system is not to model consciousness. It is not full system autonomy or machine competence at a Turing-test style for story generation. The gloss provided by… continue
Gloss on Tape for the Turn of the Year: Conversations with and about Daniel Wenk
Joseph Tabbi
October 2, 2008
P:nth-child(77)
This was before ‘cows on parade’ became an art marketing success in Chicago. In subsequent years, the author has noticed similar decorated cows (and not a few plasticine horses) in cities throughout Europe and also in Russia and the Ukraine.