Brian Lennon weighs in on developing conversation about Mark McGurl's Program Era; Lennon's response to Loren Glass's riposte argues that Bourdieu's work is invoked by Glass as an answer, not a question, "without any effort to mark...why or how Bourdieu might be right - and without leaving any sense of the debates that generated and refined Bourdieu's positions."

Through a close formal analysis of two new critical collections, Paul Benzon ponders the state of media studies as field. Exploring the material and temporal paradoxes of anthologizing new media and posthumanism, he argues that "each of these texts takes shape, succeeds, and fails under the pressures and possibilities posed by the scalar demands of information."

Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer "ping trace" can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation.

Loren Glass argues that Brian Lennon’s review of The Program Era is a “symptom of the very crisis he so ruthlessly anatomizes.” Glass suggests Lennon’s review exaggerates the anti-institutional quality of Mark McGurl’s work while displaying its own anti-institutional bias against naming “the System” it describes.

Taking seriously author Gary Hall's ground-up rethinking of the university, David Parry raises an issue not addressed in Digitize This Book, namely - what if Hall's own field of Cultural Studies has no future as a discipline in the university's digital future?

Sandy Baldwin explores the distinctions between non-digital poetry, digital poetry, and e-literature in general, and considers whether or not such distinctions are ultimately untenable.

In the wake of massive shifts in the function and purview of the University in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Brian Lennon considers two recent texts on the system of higher educational institutions and the academic practices that supports it.

Laura Dassow Walls explores how 'deliberative' reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.

Bruce Clarke reviews Joseph Caroll's Literary Darwinism and (like Laura Walls in her review of E.O. Wilson ten years earlier in ebr)identifies the LD project not as "consilience" so much as the colonization of the literary humanities by one branch of the biological sciences. In Caroll, Clarke discerns a Darwinian fundamentalism to match the Christian fundamentalism that can be observed in Clarke's own Lubbock, TX habitat.

John Durham Peters outlines "the media studies triangle," which consists of textual, social, and institutional approaches. He then stakes out another approach that considers what civilization itself has at stake in media change.

Lance Newman suggests Ecocriticism shares a problematic assumption with "green" capitalism: the idea "a livable future will result from billions of individual ethical decisions." Here he traces a burgeoning critical alternative that investigates the historical connections between global capital and the shifting structures of the "ecosocial."

Contrasting conventional notions of representational realism with the leaps of imagination underlying contemporary physics, Sean Miller explores the necessary role of an imaginary in sting theorists' search for a coherent "theory of everything."

Scott Hermanson considers the Companion's success in negotiating its own position between digital literature and print media.

John Bruni evaluates current proposals for animal rights and green capitalism, questioning whether the legal and economic discourse with which the question of animal life as thus far been bound up will ever allow us, as Cary Wolfe proposes, to think past ourselves.

"Man Ray, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, themes of disorientation, displacement, diaspora, defamiliarized language" and that's just the d's. With such "little clues, like stitches coding a special language," Maria Damen weaves an essay-narrative based on her Summer 2007 residency in Riga, Latvia.

This new thread, edited by Henry Turner and introduced by Joseph Tabbi, presents in short order what scholars today in the field of literature, science, and the arts are reading and viewing. Some of the citations appear online, and by 'enfolding' these references, ebr intends to build a profile of the field as it evolves, available to ebr readers for further annotation and construction.

A snapshot of items on Joseph Tabbi's desktops, vertical and horizontal, presented at the Chicago meeting of the Modern Language Association in December 2007.

Surveying the decline of adventure as a culturally relevant theme, Steffen Hantke argues that Tom LeClair's Passing Trilogy finds new ways of revalidating adventure for a millennial world of bourgeois security and moderation.

Countering Andrew Gallix's suggestion in The Guardian that electronic literature is finished, author Dene Grigar indicates that it may not be e-lit, but rather the institution of humanities teaching, that is in a state of crisis - and e-lit in fact could be well placed one to revive the teaching of literature in schools and universities.

Eric Dean Rasmussen introduces a gathering of twelve essays on literary resistances that imagine how a materially engaged and affectively attuned literary culture might play a more transformative role in the emergent network society.