2024
Synthesising the published record, Ted Morrissey chronicles and analyzes the relationship between literary Williams Gaddis and Gass, which began in 1976 after Gass had helped secure the National Book Award for Gaddis's J R. Morrissey examines not only the pair's shared social history of meetings, conferences, and letters, but also examines the commonalities in their approaches to literature, and their affinities of taste, habit, and vision.
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), in conversation with Nick Monfort, who is leading the CDN's Computational Narrative System's research node.
By engaging with Colin Koopman's work on the politics of information, Stephan Paur has a look at the technologically sophisticated ways that human beings are now at the mercy of our datasets. Rather than inhabiting a physical, populated place and taking part in communities, “the informational person” is increasingly outsourced into such things as birth certificates, personality profiles, racialized credit and other extractive ideologies.
In his review of Thomas Travers' book "Peripheralizing DeLillo", Conte explores the thematic undercurrents of capitalism and its discontents across Don DeLillo's oeuvre.
Benjamin Bergholz provides a detailed description of the neoliberal hellscape prophesized in J R. Bergholz identifies a dialectical relationship between our necessary failure as readers to fully comprehend the full details of J R's world, and the historical developments—mainly, the "end of history"—that drive this failure. He asks, how might Gaddis’s decision to impair the reader’s "ability to see what is happening" in the world of his novel help us better engage with "what is happening" in the world outside of it?
Traces of Vaihinger appear in Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions. But what of the rest of his corpus? John Soutter explores Vaihinger's influence on Gaddis.
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is joined by Lai-Tze Fan to discuss gendered AI assistants and the invisible labor involved in editorial work.
We asked our contributors a set of simple questions: what do you think Gaddis Studies has best covered already, what do you think are its prospects for the future, and what future avenues would you like to see explored?
Ali Chetwynd's introduction to the Gaddis centenary gathering on ebr.
A talk given on October 20th 2022 at the William Gaddis Centenary Conference at Washington University St Louis. The version presented here is the talk as delivered, with minor edits only for clarity on the page and standardized grammar. Steven Moore prefers to leave the talk as a document of its original presentation, rather than changed into an academic article with the attendant scholarly apparatus of footnotes, works cited, and so on.
Little is know about the famously private Thomas Pynchon, but can we learn anything from an early manuscript of V.? Hanjo Berressem reviews Becoming Pynchon by Luc Herman and John M. Krafft.
Davin Heckman on how his penchant for pranks got him to appreciate netprov and how he turned it into a versatile pedagogic tool that helps to broaden his students’ social sensibilities.
Drew Keller, Microsoft employee and graduate of the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen joins Scott Rettberg to talk about the potential role of AI in our media production. From the Jacquard loom to the PowerPoint designer, human creativity has always been intertwined with technology, but is the rapid increase in AI a revolution in the way we produce media, or just another tool?
Daniel Punday reviews Andrew Klobucar’s edited collection of essays, The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics.
2023
EBR would like to express thanks to Dene Grigar and Deena Larsen at Washington State University Vancouver, for organizing and hosting a memoriam for Marjorie C. Luesebrink and for letting us share the memoriam in our journal.
What can video games teach us about our relationship with animals? Hanna Hellesø Lauvli's review of GAME by Tom Tyler urges us to see life from the other side of the food chain.
Returning to past formats in the electronic book review such as 'designwriting from the mid-1990s,' ebr co-editor Lai-Tze Fan alerts readers to a feature that is as much a part of our journal's publication, and positioning, as the essays themselves. As annotations in the margins of print texts allow readers to reference earlier texts, a more interactive, intertextual and perhaps more accessible conversation is made available within and among digital texts.
Multimodal AI trained on YouTube-TikTok-Netflix (object-segmented and identified audio-video-speech) and public domain science data (that exceeds the spectrum of human sensorial field) will be grounded in a world that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a single human neurophysiology.
Scott Rettberg, director of the Center for Digital Narrative is joined by journalist and Digital Culture graduate Ashleigh Steele to talk about memes, post-truth and the way narrativity shapes our understanding of ourselves and our world. We are increasingly affected by algorithms, AI and conspiracy theories, but what kind of effect does this have on our discourse, and how do we fight back?
