[…]change is a left-wing conspiracy) are a few people willing to take on the hard task of looking critically at outlier phenomena, events and experiences that don’t fit any known paradigm, things science has (so far) been unable to explain. Such explorations lead us into the realms of folklore, sociology, group psychology, optics, particle physics, and the study of that most difficult of subjects, consciousness itself. In these three books, we have a glimpse of the ways our consciousness has come to impede this kind of exploration. Conventional wisdom would tell us that such phenomena aren’t real. They don’t exist […]
[…]on a remediated world literature, Emily Apter asserts that “ideally, one would redesign literary studies to respond critically and in real time to cartographies of emergent world-systems” (581). Insofar as every work of electronic literature represents a creative and often critical appropriation of our unevenly globalizing society’s most powerful means of meaning production, it more than deserves a place in such a revitalized and, I would argue, now unavoidably comparative discipline. For our part, we should think more about electronic literature’s engagements (and complicities) with monolingualism and with the operations of global capitalism not only out of a high-minded sense […]
[…]such as Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Expressive Processing), and Mark Marino (“L.A. Flood,” Critical Code Studies), among the many other artists and apostles of three-dimensional space. Beyond the Screen is divided into three sections, each of which considers one way that new media literary aesthetics can be said to move beyond the flat grid of the computer terminal. The first section considers the relation between literature and locative, spatially-informed media; the second offers diverse perspectives about the transformation of literary genres vis-à-vis digital media; and the third presents a short collection of essays that focus on the problems and practicalities involved in […]
[…]affect theorists—dependent as they are upon theory’s traditional, rationalistic form of “the critical essay”—when they try to suggest that their descriptive, affective methodology somehow transcends this stultifying genre and puts us in touch with something better: actual affect. I mean, isn’t this sort of like reading a romance novel and mistakenly thinking that you’ve had sex? The classic example of this in The Affect Theory Reader is Ben Highmore’s essay “Bitter after Taste,” where he focuses on a scene from a TV series where a man remembers a prior scene of another man eating a particularly hot vindaloo. Because of the […]
[…]can in fact provide the horizon and constraining force that has been missing in recent critical writing. One sign that this book opens out into a field (rather than simply offering so many more or less interesting “readings”) is the way that popular, literary, historical, and theoretical content do in fact “reinforce” one another throughout the book. Another sign is that this book does not stand alone. Its appearance reinforces, and is supported by, a number of important studies, for the most part unknown even to Adair. A similar topical range, including chapters on Tom Clancy as well as Pynchon, […]
[…]points of view, focusing as they do on “Brian” and “Brad”‘s activities apart from the group consciousness. Yet, as with everything in The Sluts, what is real is indeterminate. What is real is only language, and much of it floats, unanchored in veracity or certainty. If the violence of the prose in the George Miles Cycle often reduces character to language, to inscribability, in The Sluts even language is unsettled – the words used to describe Brad are comically, emphatically inconsistent. As Baker has observed, the information reported by his reviewers gives Brad seven different heights, ten different weights; his […]
[…]rejecting the claim that only computer software and hardware are covered by the term – platform studies might show us a new way of engaging in the dense analysis that gives us everything media studies once gave us (that is, retaining Moulthrop’s many insights) but within a richer framework. One challenge facing the new approach is that the metaphor of a “platform” has already accumulated multiple valences that are, as Tarleton Gillespie has shown, quite complex, but still primarily associated with hardware and software systems. But a platform studies perspective on Watchmen and its many fearful symmetries would account for […]
Initially presented as a thread in two parts, green and grey, Critical Ecologies continues to explore convergences among natural and constructed ecosystems, green politics and grey matter, silicon chips and sand. A 2004 Festschrift, with over a dozen essays on Joseph McElroy, hints at the literary implications of an ecological, medial turn in literary […]
[…]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 […]