Marco Abel reads recent affect theory and suggests, via discussions of fiction by Don DeLillo, Brian Evenson, and Cormac McCarthy, how literature can cultivate the reader's receptivity to these pre-subjective bodily forces.

Dave Ciccoricco reviews Michael Joyce's novel of network culture, Was. Seeing an inversion of Russian formalism in Joyce's work, Ciccoricco explores how Joyce's novel attempts to "reconcile the polylinguistic, stylistic, and ludic difficulty" of the text with an "affinity for the quotidian."

Emily Short interrogates Ian Bogost's Unit Operations and finds his approach to videogame criticism too capacious in its attempt to account for a variety of expressive media, and too narrow in its focus on low-order choices in videogames.

Joseph Tabbi surveys four recent interventions into new media studies, and argues that literary critics should not forget the power of the written word to resist the circumscribed possibilities of the current mediasphere. This review also appears in the Summer 2008 issue (Vol. 49, no. 2) of Contemporary Literature. The works under review include: The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory by Thomas Foster; My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles; Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America by Martin Kevorkian; Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Bruno Arich-Gerz reports from Munich on International Pynchon Week, 2008. Finding a retreat to traditional reading strategies, Arich-Gerz wonders whether we have lost more than we gained in the turn against theory.

John Limon surveys the boundaries of the global novel in this review of John Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World and Naomi Klein's Fences and Windows. Limon traces the trajectory of plot, character, and argument in the genre, as he reads "perhaps the first great global novel."

"Why shouldn't Wordsworth be read through Whitehead? Why shouldn't the canon of Romantic poetry be read alongside the inscription technologies of cartography or tour guides?" Eugene Thacker's challenge to the recent compartmentalization of academic literary studies is inspired by a reading of Ron Broglio's book, Technologies of the Picturesque. For Thacker, as for Broglio, literary Romanticism and phenomenological reflection are not the only unifying forces against the dissolution of the t...

Stephen Schryer contrasts narratological and postsecular readings of postmodernism in a review of Gerhard Hoffmann's vast study, From Modernsism to Postmodernism (2005), and John McClure's narrower but more pointed exploration, Partial Faiths (2007).

Through a mini-experiment Robert Lecusay explores the differences between gamers' and non-gamers' interactions with non-player characters in Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Façade.

Recorded by Joseph Tabbi. A week in the life of the artist.

Christy Dena considers the unique version of subject-object relations confronted by people who straddle the line between game-designer and academic.

A review of John Farrell's magnificent Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau, in light of contemporary literary criticism: Where Brian McHale declares an end to postmodernism, and where many discount paranoia as a passing literary interest, reviewer Tim Melley sees postmodern paranoia everywhere. As long as corporations are regarded by law as 'individuals' and conspiracy is the preferred way of understanding political and social systems, it seems that we'll remain in the longue duree of the postmodern moment.

Michael McDonough reviews Brian Kim Stefans' book of poetry Before Starting Over, asserting that Stefans is concerned with the redefinition of critical discourse in the face of the loss of the singularity of the work of art. Stefans is not out to substitute an ideology of surface and take our deep meanings away. He mines contemporary poetics with an encyclopedic attention while resisting dogmatic assertions.

Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce a group of essays on games that exceed the bounds of the tabletop playing session, the game console, or the computer screen - games that emerge out of, take place in, or encroach on, the real world.

Tim Uren argues that each improvisational theater scene functions as a game that generates its own rules within a few seconds of its inception, rules based on each performer's observation of the audience and/or other actors.

Adriene Jenik describes a project of virtual performances via avatars in online chat spaces.

Celia Pearce applies the logics of identity politics, diaspora studies, and cultural studies to an online gaming community.

Jill Walker argues that although the quests in World of Warcraft lack the narrative or linguistic sophistication that we expect from literary texts, the sustained attention that players give to games equates with the attentiveness that readers give novels (or at least that readers once gave novels - back when novels had readers).

Torill Elvira Mortensen explains the joys of the role-playing high, in which the player no longer has to contemplate how her character might act in a given situation; instead the player simply reacts as the character. Mortensen develops the case to argue that role-playing experience can lead to a cynicism about the sincerity of people's out-of-character (or real-world) personae.

Adrianne Wortzel explains a revisioning of the 1960s computer-based therapist simulator, which moves beyond the original's text-only interface to include graphics, robotics, and an ever-expanding vocabulary.