Vienna Now! Recent literary studies such as Mark Taylor’s Rewiring the Real (read Vanwesenbeeck’s review); Michael LeMahieu’s Fictions of Fact and Value; and the volume Wittgenstein and Modernism (edited by Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and LeMahieu), have ushered in a return to logical positivism in literary studies, more than two decades after the perceived impasse between continental and analytical philosophy (as captured in the historical stand-off between Derrida and Searle) seemed to have been decisively settled in favor of the former (read Kellert’s essay and Michaels’ essay). Perhaps not coincidentally, this return to logical positivism is drawing renewed attention to the Vienna Circle […]
[…]irretrievable, but our distance from their origin confers a powerful nostalgia, even to their critical reception. A digital world-weariness, too, has set in. Assertions in the late 1990s that online advertising would never catch on evoke later handwringing over blogging’s rise, which in turn sounds just as quaint as the claim (briefly popular in 2010) that the iPad would never sell with a name so polysemic. The following essays from 1995 to 2003 inhabit a utopian moment that has since been eclipsed, and a series of moments that continue to be eclipsed with increasing frequency. Central to the moment was […]
[…]at ebr/altx, we’re ready to put an end to the construction of periodical issues. Instead of working within an unconsidered paradigm inherited from print media, the ebr editors intend to construct our own ends, over time and on terms that we set for ourselves (within the constraints of the web […]
For many who are committed to working in electronic environments, an electronic “review” might better be named a “retrospective,” a mere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. There’s a technological subtext to the declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring that subtext to the surface will be part of ebr’s […]
[…]protocols, new interfaces, and possibly even new ways of drawing the boundaries between text and code, digital gaming and textual […]
[…]our non-periodical, continuous publication is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary […]
[…]actively promoted) that appears to have calcified and entrapped Acker herself when she fell out of critical favor. Thus, if her “life was a fable,” it was one “created through means both within and beyond her control” (14, 15). Kraus’s novelistic powers are also on display throughout After Kathy Acker. Kraus is adept at recreating particular scenes, such as the description of one of Acker’s apartments in New York: “Mornings, the sound of the boiler kicking on wakes them up early, and they go back to sleep. Steam heat moves through the pipes, but it never fully warms the room. […]
[…]parasitic audience with a flexible backbone who neglect knowledge and culture, who harm the working class with a disregard for culture and live their lives, never seriously taking anything into account.» However, the fate of non-half-intellectuals was not too rosy. For example, Khvylovy shot himself in 1933, protesting against the arrests of his friends, and most of them were killed by the Soviet government in 1937 (the generation of Ukrainian artists liquidated that year is often called Executed Renaissance). The half-intellectual author at long last always became both a bad engineer and a poor writer, but when in the time […]
James O’Sullivan is the Founding Editor of New Binary Press and Digital Literary Studies, a freelance journalist, and writer. He took up a lectureship at University College Cork in July 2017, and there he will host the 2019 conference of the Electronic Literature […]
Daniel Schulz, studies History and English Studies at the University of Cologne. In 2016 he finished his BA with the thesis “Body, Text, and Society in the Work of Kathy Acker.” From March 7th to September 15th 2017 he carried out the inventory of the Kathy Acker Study at the University of Cologne, which he is currently […]