newsletter

We would like to issue a formal correction to our last newsletter. ebr was founded in 1995 by Mark Amerika, Joseph Tabbi, and Ron Sukenick, so 2020 marks its 25th anniversary. This month’s issue is a special gathering—ebr’s largest ever—by Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez and James O’Sullivan of select works from the 2019 Meeting of the Electronic Literature Organization in Cork, Ireland. With 19 works in total, this issue commemorates the conference through keynote addresses, scholarly essays, and artistic reflections. In the Keynote Addresses of this gathering, the April 2020 issue of ebr was delight… continue

March 2020 marked the 25th anniversary of electronic book review. Though we are all apart, we wish to recognize this milestone with you and which occurs through your support. ebr extends well wishes to you and your loved ones during this difficult time and hope that you will remain safe. We will continue to publish as normal. We would like to thank the Electronic Literature Organization for their hard work in organizing the 2020 Meeting of the ELO, particularly the team at UCF (Anastasia Salter, Mel Stanfill, and others). And while we can’t meet in person, it is fortunate that much of our work… continue

“Electronic Literature Experimentalism beyond the Great Divide. A Latin American Perspective” presents the text of Claudia Kozak’s keynote for the 2018 ELO conference. By beginning with various tensions, such as the tension between the occasionally excessive tendencies of a rigorously experimental avant-garde to reach a narrow audience and linking this to the often limited audience of e-lit, Kozak expertly historicizes the avant-gardes of the twentieth century—especially by building on the work of Susan Buck-Morss, Peter Bürger, and Andreas Huyssen—in order to not only show the extent to which… continue

ebr is delighted to announce that the 6th biennial Critical Code Studies Working Group has begun, led by Mark Marino and Jeremy Douglass. Many members of ELO and readers of ebr are contributors to this and previous CCSWGs, and this year’s Group extends previous conversations by focusing on special topics such as Indigenous Programming and Feminist AI. You can follow ongoing conversations (January 20 to February 9, 2020) as they unfold on the Group’s website. * This month, ebr publishes “At a Heightened Level of Intensity: A Discussion of the Philosophy and Poetics of Language in John Cayley’s… continue

Stephanie LeMenager’s essay “Notes on a Civics for the Sixth Extinction” rhetorically navigates the condition of “living climate change.” Here, living climate change refers to responses in the “ambitious cultural project that writers, artists, scholars, and activists have been undertaking” in creating public awareness and procedure in climate change. While LeMenager focuses on the US as a global superpower that is also a climate change denier, recently I have also thought of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for his lack of action in the Australian bushfires (started in September 2019 a… continue

This month’s special issue on “Natural Media” is edited by ebr’s Editors, Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Dean Rasmussen. This gathering developed out of a panel hosted by the MLA’s MS Forum on Visual Media, and it considers the critical intersections of communicative media and media technologies with natural spaces. The essays, reviews, and interview will be of special interest to ebr readers who explore areas that include the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, media archaeology, and ecofeminism. Readers could perhaps start with Lisa Swanstrom’s essay “The Effulgence of the North: An Introductio… continue

This month, ebr publishes a review of Steve Clay and Ken Friedman’s Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, reviewed by Betsy Sullivan and Virgina Kuhn. Known for his work on intermedia, in particular his 1965 essay “Intermedia,” Dick Higgins has been called writer, artist, and theorist. In their review “Many Lives to Live,” Betsy Sullivan and Virginia Kuhn identify Higgins’ unique technological literacy for his generation. In this vein, they highlight that the collection is able to represent Higgins’ experimental approaches to creation, encompassing… continue

The question of whether or not computers can write autonomously is at this point moot (hello, AI and generative text!), but perhaps where the field of digital writing needs further exploration is in the re-examination of writing practices, as well as how they can be taught. In their essay “Digital Writing: Philosophical and Pedagogical Issues,” Serge Bouchardon and Victor Petit argue that the technical (material) and symbolic (cultural) dimensions of digital writing must be explored as a Janus faced issue. Building upon established theories of writing from Derrida and Barthes, the essay explor… continue

For many of us, September is the time to return to campuses, the time for seasonal change. This year, Fall comes early (or Summer lingers too long) all over the globe and weather patterns continue to be abnormal. We all hear about climate change, we discuss strange weather patterns, and we analyze the Anthropocene in classrooms; it has never been a more important topic. This month, ebr re-prints an essay that applies a poet’s eye, ear, and spirit to this term “Anthropocene” to encapsulate the implications that humans have had on Earth. Joan Retallack’s essay “Hard Days Nights in the Anthropoce… continue

This month, we have an essay from Bruce Clarke entitled “Margulis, Autopoiesis, Gaia,” in which Clarke recounts his own process of critically and pedagogically working with the concept of “gaia” (the relations of things, as they exist on our planet, in relation the sun) through scientific discourse. In Lynn Margulis’s work What is Life? and Symbiotic Planet, Clarke comes to the realization that “if Gaia is a system, then Gaia theory is a form of systems theory” that can also articulate autopoietic or self-producing systems. Embracing approaches to autopoiesis, Clarke describes the expansi… continue