How does a sample of de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater give birth to a mutant, six-fingered hand? This essay articulates the logic of Noon's 2001 experiment in constrained writing, which concretizes the play of signal and noise, pattern and randomness, in the flow of information. In the process, the critic suggests, Noon dramatizes how printed texts rupture and reassemble when they are transferred to electronic media.

Richard Kalich's latest protagonist is Richard Kalich, but one critic views this postmodern occupation of the novel as an opportunity - even an encouragement - to forget about him.

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, while simultaneously using the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.

Reviewing the week's discussion of Programmed Visions, Sarah Zurhellen finds a pleasurable respite that, necessarily, generated as many questions as answers.

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.

Beginning his review by reflecting on the book's cover art, John Bruni speculates that a punk aesthetic runs throughout Alaimo's posthuman environmentalism. Providing brief treatments of each chapter, he argues that the book's trans-corporeal understanding of the relationship between bodies and places disrupts "the very heart of what we know about ourselves."

In this review Veronica Vold charts the posthuman environmental ethic in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and notes how the text draws together issues of race, (dis)ability, and the environment in a way that disrupts the boundaries between bodies and places.

Gregg Biglieri offers some advice on reading McElroy: jettison one's habitual grammars and adopt the grammars of time and timing. Become an expert in sound. Become all ear.

Is 'overinterpretation' good or bad? Is it even possible, and is it ever enough? (Or are we reading too much into this?) Clint Burnham shadows Colin Davis as he traces the interventions of a "wild bunch" of critics, theorists, and philosophers, who grapple with the question of what counts as a reading of a literary text.

Citing the narrator's radical ambivalence about time, history, and the flesh, Maureen Curtin argues that American Genius, A Comedy represents the hysteria of the contemporary "post-political" moment.

Contrasting Lynne Tillman's text with the "complicitous critique" of Donald Barthelme and other postmodern ironists, Sue-Im Lee argues that Tillman's narration displays the "mobility" of Adornian cultural criticism, in which contradiction is not a problem but a mode of interrogating the present.

Most recent "Great American Novels" are not great, but merely big. Lynne Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy, by contrast, is designed with scale, not size, in mind. So argues Kasia Boddy, who reads the novel as a critical engagement with book reviewers' favorite cliché for ambitious social fiction. Instead of resisting cultural obsolescence through sheer assertion, Tillman's book examines how the cracks and contradictions of American ideology have imprinted themselves on the individual body, bearer of the national disease: sensitivity.

"Like skin, the comma both connects and divides." Peter Nicholls traces Tillman's endlessly subordinating, endlessly equivocating sentences, showing how their quest for historical and social clarity passes through an interminable sequence of deferral and denial.

How do you annotate an experience? Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux grapple with competing logics of computer code at the intersection of Adventure, nostalgia and new media scholarship.

In Week 3 of a six-part series, Critical Code Studies contributors spelunk the mysteries of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal text adventure game. Delving into close readings of the original FORTRAN code, the group plots the twisty passages linking media theory, deconstruction and philosophies of programming.

How does one write science fiction when the atom bomb (and later 9/11) makes the future seem impossible to predict? Justin Roby reviews Paul Youngquist's Cyberfiction: After the Future, which explores how postwar "cy-fi" critiqued life in the age of cybernetic control systems.

Caroline Levine argues that Jason Mittell's attempts to classify The Wire by genre results in "some slippery logic, some fruitful and provocative but not altogether persuasive argumentative moves in Mittell's own game." She suggests that examining the show through the lens of form - not genre - clarifies why it warrants comparisons with texts like Bleak House: both works attempt to represent the distinctly networked quality of urban social life.

Can Critical Code Studies overcome the divide between technology workers and technocultural theorists?

In the second installment of a six-week discussion, contributors search for examples of Critical Code Studies "in the wild." Instead of asking how code can be read critically, they examine how code is already being created and disputed by lawyers, programmers, and the general public.

Can the rising cost of cosmopolitan real estate have brought the New York City novel to a low point? Tom LeClair measures recent fictions from and about New York City - including three "9/11 novels" - against the Systems Novel of the mid-1970s.