publications Page 16 of 61

2017

04-Nov-2017
Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications

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.

03-Sep-2017
The Mourning of Work in For a New Critique of Political Economy: Bernard Stiegler, a Hacker Ethic, and Greece’s Debt Crisis

"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

06-Aug-2017
Infiltrating Aesthetics: Videogames, Art, and Distinction

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."

06-Aug-2017
Text Generation, or Calling Literature into Question

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.

02-Jul-2017
Review of Stewart O'Nan's West of Sunset

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.

03-Jun-2017
The End of Landscape: Holes by Graham Allen

In her discussion of the textual, technical, and figurative characteristics of Graham Allen’s Holes (2017), Karhio “argues that [Allen's text] is not a landscape poem in the customary sense” and explores the ways in which the digital platforms deployed in the project’s creation and publication contribute to the signifying structures that “challenge the idea of landscape as symbolic representation of the inner world of the speaking subject.”

16-May-2017
Speaking to Listening Machines: Literary Experiments with Aural Interfaces

Reading practices have changed along the course of history. Before the ‘democratization’ of the written word - from Homer's Iliad to the medieval troubadours and to more recent public and private oral reading traditions -, reading has long been associated with listening. Today, in the age of algorithms and ‘smart’ interfaces, the sharing of language between humans and computational devices is increasingly ubiquitous and, with the standarization of artificial intelligence systems like Siri, Cortana, and Google Now, we are starting to speak and to listen to machines. In the field of digital literary creation, one example of aesthetic reflection on the questions raised by such networked ‘smart’ interfaces is John Cayley's The Listeners (2015), "a linguistic performance — transacted by visitors and Amazon’s voice-activated Artificial Intelligence and domestic robot, Alexa" (Cayley, 2015b). Through an analysis of The Listeners, articulated with Bernard Stiegler’s notion of the digital pharmakon, this paper aims to reflect on the encounter between literature and digital technologies. Three ideas will be highlighted: 1) the ways in which the technical, economic and political layers that constitute our digital devices pre-determine their usage (how they operate and are operated); 2) the automatic processing of language and orality as interfaces of mediation between humans and “smart” devices; 3) the literary implications of aurality and aurature.

24-Apr-2017
Before Corporate Monoculture

In this review of Henry Turner’s The Corporate Commonwealth, Thomas considers how Turner historicizes the term “corporatization” to explore its wide-ranging definitions and functions in early-modern England.

The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 Henry Turner, Chicago UP, 2016

24-Apr-2017
Towards Buen Vivir

In this review of The Power at the End of the Economy, Lestón delineates the theoretical apparatus of Massumi's book and its possible implications.

24-Apr-2017
Un/Official Worlds

In this review of Mark Seltzer’s The Official World, Ulmer reflects on the interdependence of “the official” and “the unofficial” in contemporary constructs of reality.

17-Apr-2017
A Digital Publishing Model for Publication by Writers (for Writers)

How might literary databases be seen as alternatives to the commodification of academic scholarship in for profit, subscriber platforms?  Scott Rettberg and Joseph Tabbi discuss issues related to instrumentality, the global marketplace, and the digital humanities.

17-Apr-2017
Academia.“edu”

Investigating the question of whether academics should be concerned that Academia.edu is not an educational institution, Johannah Rodgers finds that the answers depend on your definition of “education” and which parties you ask.

17-Apr-2017
An Ontological Turn

In this review of Mitchum Huehls’ After Critique, Smith situates Huehls' “ontological approach” to the study of contemporary literature as arising from and standing in opposition to the "zombie plague" of neoliberalism.

17-Apr-2017
Ghostbusters 2.0

If the 1984 Ghostbusters film can be read as an early foreshadowing of the neoliberal transformation of the United States of America, how might the film’s 2016 sequel be interpreted?  Ralph Clare reviews the new film in the context of his reading of the original in his 2014 book Fictions, Inc.

17-Apr-2017
Love Your Corporation

Analyzing the long and complex history of the term corporation, Turner explores the possibility that the term's roots in the universitasmight serve as a basis for a re-translation and re-valuation of the corporate concept and establish a ground, both discursive and practical, for a reassessment of the “political” as a process of imaginative transformation and collective action.

17-Apr-2017
The Economics of Book Reviews

In a review of the contemporary publishing marketplace in the U.S. and the many definitions of "corporate fiction," Di Leo, editor of the American Book Review, offers some insights into the new economics of digital publishing and how ABR's recent decision to partner with ProjectMuse ended the "online poaching" of the magazine's content.

02-Apr-2017
Back to the Book: Tempest and Funkhouser’s Retro Translations

Jeneen Naji describes Chris Funkhouser’s Press Again and Sonny Rae Tempest’s Famicommunist Poetics as examples of “the UnderAcademy style” begun by Talan Memmott. At the same time, within the context of post-digital publication, Naji explores concepts like "transcreation" and "translation" insofar as the two digital practitioners have conveyed experimental e-texts into print.

02-Apr-2017
Precarity or Normalization? Yes, Please! A Review of Isabell Lorey’s State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious

In this review, three social conditions of the Precarious (“precariousness, precarity, and (governmental) precarization”) are described. Furthermore, the neo-liberalist use of self-regulation as a means to exert control over individuals is exposed. The possibility to turn precarity into “a form of political mobilization,” as suggested by Lorey, is also explored.

15-Mar-2017
Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality

In this essay, Robert P. Fletcher demonstrates how, while putting together digital and print media affordances, augmented print may evoke in readers a sense of the uncanny. Fletcher also explains how works such as Amaranth Borsuk’s Abra (2014), Aaron A. Reed and Jacob Garbe’s Ice-Bound (2016) or Stuart Campbell’s Modern Polaxis (2014) seem to demonstrate the existence of a never-ending return of the “familiar” in electronic literature.

05-Mar-2017
Debates in the Digital Humanities formerly known as Humanities Computing

In a review that addresses (and exposes) the founding myth of the "digital humanities" (DH), formerly known as "humanities computing,” Roberto Simanowski and Luciana Gattass measure just how much the 99 articles collected by Mathew Gold and Lauren Klein have overturned "academic life as we know it."