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2018

05-May-2018
Of Myth and Madness: A Postmodern Fable

Ralph Clare reviews After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus.

03-Mar-2018
Review of Making Literature Now by Amy Hungerford

Berry, who with ebr editor Joseph Tabbi initiated the Fictions Present thread (circa 2006), finds few intersections of that project with Hungerford’s celebrated Making Literature Now, not least because Hungerford shows little interest in the question of how her titular concept, when applied to commercial and cultural productions, indie and alt endeavors, “manages to mean what those trying to make literature are trying to make.”

2017

04-Dec-2017
"Bad Disruption"

ebr Associate Editor Lai-Tze FAN responds to Dani Spinosa's review of *llegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity,*by David S. Roh.

03-Dec-2017
Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity

Dani Spinosa reviews David S. Roh's Illegal Literature a book about authorship, copyright, fair use and literary disruptions.

02-Jul-2017
Review of Stewart O'Nan's West of Sunset

In this review of O'Nan's West of Sunset, Messenger explores 20th Century American literary history as a kind of contemporary metafictional myth. Using Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as characters composing the life of a literary icon against the emergence of "Hollywood," O'Nan's work is considered a bittersweet meditation on the death of an author and the hope that his work lives on.

05-Feb-2017
The New, New, New Philology

In this review of Rethinking the New Medievalism, Matt Cohen ponders the significance of philology's ongoing period of "reflection, [...] refraction, and revisitation." Against the backdrop of contemporary shifts in the humanities, more generally, Cohen sees opportunities for medievalists to intervene, bringing with them both clarity and innovation to fields in a state of fluctuation.

2016

06-Nov-2016
An Aesthetics of the Unsaid

Andrew Lindquist reviews Michael LeMahieu's Fictions of Fact and Value, examining the influence of logical positivism on American literature of the postwar era.

05-Jun-2016
“Persist in Folly”: Review of Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973.

Afterthoughts on the end of the sixties, the death of the author, the rise of Theory and the fall of humanism.

06-Mar-2016
Recounting Signatures: A Review of James McFarland’s Constellation

In reviewing James McFarland’s Constellation, Donald Cross reminds readers of the rich potential of scholarly discourse. Beyond mere citations and their absence, Cross traces across the bright stars of Nietzsche and Benjamin (and Derrida) relationships worthy of serious consideration. In an age of copy/paste citations, impact reports, and optimized academics, pondering the constellations offers an opportunity to rediscover the subtle intensity of tracing forms in the void.

06-Mar-2016
The Primacy of the Object

In his review of Martin Paul Eve’s Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno, Julius Greve situates this new book on Pynchon within the upheavals produced by speculative realism and contemporary discourses on materialism. In doing so, Greve reminds us of what was always already the case: the literary-philosophical relevance of Pynchon, which turns out to be all the more inescapable in contemporary political climates.

07-Feb-2016
The Last Novel

Originally publication: The Schofield, Issue 1.1 - David Markson & Solitude - Summer 2015 (page 13). Reprinted with permission.

03-Jan-2016
Digital Revision

In this analytical, unabashedly philosophical engagement with Alex Galloway's "sneakily-titled" Laruelle Against the Digital, Martin Eve sides with the skeptics for whom "Laruelle proves a better diagnostician of epistemic illness than he is prescriber of a cure."

2015

06-Dec-2015
Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again: Tupitsyn Art Review

McKenzie Wark explores the work of Masha Tupitsyn as a pathway into the conditions of life in the 21st Century, somewhere above (or below) the framework of mediated experience, even beyond the limits of what we often call "theory." With Tupitsyn, Wark troubles the current stasis of representation that stultifies thought in this age of unrepentantly industrialized culture, not by turning us away from the spectacle, but by smashing right through it, picking up its pieces, and discovering new things in the wreckage.

03-May-2015
A World in Numbers: A Review of Michael Joyce, Going the Distance

Joyce’s treatment of baseball in Going the Distance isn’t merely thematic, according to Punday, who believes that baseball (and its emphasis on numerical ordering) here represents the balance of the poetic and computational that defines Joyce’s electronic literature.

03-May-2015
An Interview with Steve Tomasula

Steve Tomasula discusses the development and context of his work (and TOC in particular), including relations to print and electronic literature, in this interview with Kiki Benzon.

03-May-2015
The Importance of Being Earnest in Flatland

By working through the resemblances between Tomasula's Vas: An Opera in Flatland (2004) and Edward Abbott's much earlier Flatland (1884), Pham-Thanh establishes how Tomasula "orchestrates the downfall of the traditional hegemonic masculinity" that defined Abbott's time.

03-May-2015
Undead Letters and Archaeologies of the Imagination: Review of Michael Joyce’s Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden

Ciccoricco acknowledges that Michael Joyce's new novel (Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden), which gives a fictionalized account of Foucualt's relationship to Jean Barraque, opens Joyce up to a broader range of criticisms, though Ciccoricco also argues that by focusing on a "productive and troubled time for Foucault," Joyce ultimately offers a "compelling meditation on what we might call the nexus of madness, philosophy, and literature."

2014

05-Oct-2014
I Read Because it is Absurd

Vanwesenbeeck situates Mark Taylor’s recent Rewiring the Real, within a growing body of critical literature (which also includes John McClure’s Partial Faiths and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief) that regards religion as key to a robust account of postmodern culture—and for Taylor, in particular, as key to appreciating the novels of William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo

03-Aug-2014
… without shame or concern for etymology: 11 September in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

In “…without shame or concern for etymology,” Hanjo Berressem discusses Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in the context of post-9/11 fiction. In contrast to narratives of post-traumatic melancholy, Berressem argues that Bleeding Edge is a “Jeremiad about the fall and the sins of America.” The result is an essay that makes a powerful case for Pynchon as a prophetic, if brutal, witness to American society turning towards security and control in the shadow of tragedy.

2013

27-Dec-2013
Against an Aesthetics of Disappearance (review of Timothy Melley's The Covert Sphere)

According to Fabienne Collignon, Timothy Melley’s refusal to submit “clear vectors of resistance” to "so-called democratic states" in The Covert Sphere is far from a shortcoming of the work, and instead marks its distinct quality. The absence of clear political solution, Collignon contends, informs The Covert Sphere’s achievement as a call for a change of mind in a population who, wittingly or not, have "participated in, and continue to collaborate with, a system of pretended innocence and victimization."