2018
Ralph Clare reviews After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus.
A dedicated, elaborated thought stream from an author who, like McElroy, has read and thought about the presence of censorship (as theme and experience) in novels by Ross Gibson, Shariar Mandinipour,J. .M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Mark Z Danielewski, Italo Calvino, and Fernando Pessoa. Author David Thomas Henry Wright explores the (loss of) authority of the literary novel in a time of "networked glut" while at the same time seeking trans-national, trans-historical, photographic, multi-medial and inter-generational "alliances" that might redress contemporary censorship and "deeply shape (or erode) contemporary literature."
Bergthaller's essay originally appeared in the collection, Ecological Thought in Germany. It is reprinted here, with permissions from Lexington Books, as part of an ebr gathering on Natural Media (December 2019).
Addressing a lacuna in games studies, Jason Lajoie makes a case for why a queer games studies is needed, and he shows how these two areas of study are united in Bonnie Ruberg's and Adrienne Shaw's collection.
Berry, who with ebr editor Joseph Tabbi initiated the Fictions Present thread (circa 2006), finds few intersections of that project with Hungerford’s celebrated Making Literature Now, not least because Hungerford shows little interest in the question of how her titular concept, when applied to commercial and cultural productions, indie and alt endeavors, “manages to mean what those trying to make literature are trying to make.”
Adrian Miles (1960 — 2018) was an early theorist, practitioner and teacher of cinematic hypertext and networked, "writerly" video. In memory of his innovative research in these fields, ebr presents this short dialogue between Adrian and founding ebr publisher Mark Amerika. The text is republished from META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, by Mark Amerika, with permission from The MIT Press.
What binds literature, electronic literature and games is "the shaping and networking of the imagination." Drawing on the ideas of Damasio, Walton and Sartre, Gordon Calleja looks at the synthesizing role of the imagination in narrative indie games.
Beginning as a talk delivered at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine May 17, 2017, now edited and amplified for publication in the electronic book review and the 2018 collection of ebr essays forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.
Repetition, gestural abstraction and depictions of noise; anabsence of narrative causation, a multiplicity of micro-narratives and opacity of material communications: The digital narrativity observed and created by Will Luers is equally applicable to the films of Stanley Kubrick or the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch - which implies a longer continuity (and less radical transformation?) than we might have expected. Indeed, Luers argues that "networks and nonlinear systems" might better be understood as "something deep in our brains," even as narrative may be regarded "as a necessary construct, but not the complete picture of reality."
Gregor Baszak parses Nagle's celebrated, and "overdue" reconsideration of the internet, and social media in particular as a battlefield for politics.
If it's true, as Leiya Lee argues, that Akira Mizuta Lippit turns Derridean theory into a system, then it's a system grounded in ghostly presences (not least Derrida's own presence in film).
2017
ebr Associate Editor Lai-Tze FAN responds to Dani Spinosa's review of *llegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity,*by David S. Roh.
David Jhave Johnston responds to Theadora Walsh's review of his book Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications.
Dani Spinosa reviews David S. Roh's Illegal Literature a book about authorship, copyright, fair use and literary disruptions.
"More is not necessarily more. Faster is not necessarily better. Big data is not necessarily better." In the effort to capture and make available data about people, digital humanities scholars must now weigh the decisions of what and what not to share. Geoffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt address the new ethical issues around “datafication” in an age of surveillance.
A review of Aesthetic**Animism, so vulnerably personal, and at the same time so pragmatically organized, that it might just suggest a possible future for scholarly and creative scholarship: a digital practice that (in Jhave's words) "distends selves towards collectivities that remind it of oblivion." For the moment, that inevitability is avoided by the book's receipt of the 2017 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.
"Even among the Greeks and Romans, the most advanced nations of antiquity, money reaches its full development, which is presupposed in modern bourgeois society, only in the period of disintegration."- Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Though scholars of literature and the arts remain skeptical, Strunk explores some of the ways "videogames are making the transition into being objects worthy of artistic attention."
Reflecting on the genealogy and histories of "transgressive textualities" and text generators, Aquilina offers readings of texts by Swift, Dahl, Orwell, and Borges to consider the terms and issues involved in situating text generators as transgressive.
In this review of O'Nan's West of Sunset, Messenger explores 20th Century American literary history as a kind of contemporary metafictional myth. Using Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as characters composing the life of a literary icon against the emergence of "Hollywood," O'Nan's work is considered a bittersweet meditation on the death of an author and the hope that his work lives on.