2005
Jokes play a fundamental role in Slavoj Žižek's philosophizing. Is Žižek joking when he extols the virtues of Christianity to the Left? Eric Dean Rasmussen analyzes Žižek's pro-Christian proselytizing as attacks on modes of PC-ness - political correctness and perverse Christianity - that sustain an undesirable neoliberalism.
Aron Pease introduces this collection of essays by Linda Brigham, Caren Irr, William Wilson and Nick Spencer with a look at the multitude's programmability.
1999 e-literature award winner John Cayley writes about Saul Bass of classic film title fame. A precursor to language arts innovators Jenny Holzer, Richard Kostelanetz, and Cayley himself, Bass may now be recognized as a poet in his own 'write,' important for a new generation of designwriters creating "graphic bodies of language," moving words and signifying images, in digital environments.
Chris Stroffolino responds to Lori Emerson
Scott Rettberg, responding to "The Pixel/The Line" (section 4 of First Person) wonders whether electronic writing isn't evolving into a subspecies of electronic art, one that uses words as material, 'just as sculptors use clay.'
Lori Emerson reviews The Shape of the Signifier by Walter Benn Michaels.
Now that the First Person essay collection is complete and the case has been made for computer games as a form of narrative, Brian Kim Stefans asks the fundamental questions - concerning what can be read as literature, and what really cannot.
"Playing with play," John Cayley sets ludology on an even playing field with literature, but without literary scholarship's over-reliance on 'story,' 'closure,' and 'pleasure.'
Julie Cupples reviews a retrospective collection of essays by Chandra Mohanty on the geopolitics of gender and race.
The reader steps to the fore in the final section of First Person, reconfigured and ready for interaction.
Reading subjectivity into the software interface, N. Katherine Hayles offers a compelling case for computational authorship.
Jill Walker's encounter with a participatory, and vaguely sinister, online narrative.
Which alias best fits interactive fiction? The nominees are: "Story," "Game," "Storygame," "Novel," "World," "Literature," "Puzzle," "Problem," "Riddle," and "Machine." Read, and decide.
Tim Keane on rock'n'roll awakenings and the lyrical existentialism of U2 (St Patrick's Day Special, 2005)
The subject of conversation enters the conversation that is First Person, here in section seven.
Warren Sack uses The Conversation Map, a "graphical interface" that analyzes newsgroups and listservs, to analyze the possibilities of discourse analysis itself.
"Collaboration shifts": Victoria Vesna investigates the digital/physical limn, the compression of spacetime, and the condition of tensegrity in projects such as n0time and Datamining Bodies.
The subtitle - "Using Voice Chips and Speech Recognition Chips to Explore Structures of Participation in Sociotechnical Scripts" - tells the story, partly. But there's more in store.
Cris Mazza on hijacking the terms of postfeminism.