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Finding the Human in “the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world”: Embodiment, Place, and Materiality in Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures

[…]also links to a 37,000-page archive of chemical industry documents assembled by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a group that also operates the Human Toxome Project’s “Mapping the Pollution in People.” Links to this project provide users with a catalogue of particular toxicants found in human bodies all over the world. The project couples this chemical data with detailed portraits of real people who have tested positive for various toxicants and chemicals. Alaimo argues that such electronic literatures combine scientific data, medical narratives, and political calls to action to provide new practice of meaning-making for ordinary experts to use in […]
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Review of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

[…]of the environmental justice movement in the early twentieth century. Alaimo examines Le Sueur’s working-class politics through recurring images of humans joined with the earth as a critique of and resistance to capitalist exploitation. While she notes Le Sueur’s challenge to gender tropes in her vision of a masculine nature and feminine desire, Alaimo comments that Le Sueur’s “enthusiasm for a kind of maternal, proletarian vitality betrays exactly the sort of essentialism that mires the (reproductive) female body within the relentless fecundity of nature” (38). That said, Alaimo’s close reading of Le Sueur’s article, “Women Know a Lot of Things,” […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Four Discussion

In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “On Sourcery and Source Codes,” the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun’s psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible. Week 4 of the CCS discussion began with a reading from the first chapter of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s recent book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. We are grateful to MIT Press for allowing us to share […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Four Introduction

[…]open up spaces of discovery. Nevertheless, it was our shared text for Week 4 of the Critical Code Studies Working Group – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s first chapter from her forthcoming book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory – that challenged me to rethink the anecdote of my dad’s fingertips in relationship to notions of ritual and magic that undergird so much of our technological practice. In this chapter, Chun introduces the term “sourcery” to signify what she sees as contemporary culture’s fetishism of source code. Software (source code), Chun claims, “is a magical force that promises to bring together the […]
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“You are cordially invited to a / CHEMICAL WEDDING”: Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus

[…]wedding invitation in the next interim text (Fig. 9): The wedding invitation is framed by DNA code which, through its distinctive detachment from the invitation itself, gestures back to the two paradoxical dialectics. That is, the disconnected DNA codes are visual representations of signifiers which may be floating, flickering, or both. Hayles argues that “mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both […]
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See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

[…]– can do full justice to the under-language of Watchmen. As indicated, this comic delivers not a working timepiece but something more like a catastrophe simulator, an open-ended experiment that the reader is invited or expected to perform. Understanding Watchmen in this light makes it seem distinctly avant la lettre, something impossible to describe in traditional terms. More than the relic of an older, spatial way of seeing, it prefigures and perhaps inaugurates the next thing in sign systems. In this century we are beginning to build on our technologies of recording and inscription new media and new language that […]
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How to Fail (at) Fiction and Influence Everybody: A Review of Penthouse-F by Richard Kalich

[…]and reader, between the codes given by a text and the choices readers make in interpreting those codes. At times, the writing of Penthouse-F signals a kind of literary seriousness, in prose that attains to the tradition the book so clearly cherishes. Describing an act of warmth and contact with his captives (a foot massage), Kalich muses, “An even greater sense of power and erotic command enveloped me as I observed the girl’s imploring, pleading eyes begging that I do the same for the boy, asking nothing for himself, but rather only for the girl” (178). Yet the text undermines […]
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A Review of Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States

[…]I look at an article in Russian, I say, ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode” (qtd. 65). And indeed, through most of the Cold War, MT energies and resources were funneled into translating (nominally, at any rate) more Soviet data than the human component of U.S. intelligence agencies could possibly process, even as the agents themselves were thereby absolved from any need to actually learn Russian (96–97). Lennon bends this in two directions: toward “the drive to optimize” (qtd. 63), on the one hand, that […]
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“With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be”: An Interview with Zoe Beloff

[…]it. Instead I created my own industrial film that I am putting into dialog with aspects of Motion Studies Application and Folie à Deux in a three-channel work. Now I am working on a series of drawings that are formally inspired by workplace posters. Again, as in all my projects, I am interested in our mental relation with the technologies of the moving image. Here I am drawing on the work of the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the pioneering “industrial engineers,” who believed that the worker could use the tools of cinema to change his work methods and so become […]
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The Maypole is the Medium: A Review of The Networked Wilderness by Matt Cohen

[…]body, the body of a king, becomes a metonym for the ideal relationship between the two groups: Native and English. When Winslow heals Massassoit, he also heals the Wampanoag society, in danger of dissolution or coup d’etat during his illness. This act seals a sort of compact of cooperation between the two groups. The cure signifies in the way a treaty cannot because, in a methodology characterized by opposition between literacy and illiteracy, written communication and contract is in effect a kind of protection racket, in which European theories of property relations produce the need for agreement in the first […]
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Anomalies

[…]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 […]

Where Are We Now?: Orienteering in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2

[…]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 […]
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A New “Gospel of the Three Dimensions”: Expanding the Boundaries of Digital Literature in Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla’s Beyond the Screen

[…]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 […]
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Blind Hope: A Review of Gregg and Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader

[…]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 […]
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Epic at the End of Empire

[…]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, […]

“Is this for real? Is that a stupid question?”: A Review of Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts

[…]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 […]
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Watching Watchmen: A Riposte to Stuart Moulthrop

[…]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 […]
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Editor’s gathering for thread critical ecologies

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 […]
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Editor’s gathering for thread end construction

[…]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 […]
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Editor’s gathering for thread electropoetics

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 […]
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