Eric Dean Rasmussen explores Lynne Tillman's "cognitive aesthetic," suggesting that her work is powered by the generative disconnect between asignifying affect and signifying emotion. He argues that her 1998 novel, No Lease on Life, examines the role of affectively sustained universal values in responding politically to the neoliberal city.

David Golumbia's response to Brian Lennon's "Gaming the System."

R.M. Berry responds to Brian Lennon and Loren Glass by noting the crucial differences between the various forms of institutionalization that are endemic (or should be considered so) to their conversations on "The System."

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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."

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).

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.

Brian Willems reads a number of fictional and critical texts, from ebr essays to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, to argue that they all point toward the dissolution of the borders among humans, animals, and machines.

Simon Critchley's study of ethics has been prominently reviewed by literary and cultural theorists, though most treatments accept the premise that ethical relations are primarily among people, that ethics depends mainly on intersubjective relations. This review by Daniel Punday resituates "Infinitely Demanding" in a networked context, one that is constructed by "media, by global flows, and by the larger network swarms which themselves take on an identity." For Punday, an ethics for our time is best found, not by the study of identities and localities, but rather by authors of contemporary fiction such as Jonathan Letham, Susan Daitch, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Nichoas Spencer argues for the importance of "anarchistic and spatial factors" in twentieth-century utopian thought despite the resistance to them in the Marxist texts under review by Brown, DeKoven, Jameson, and Puchner.

Anthony Enns questions Kathleen Fitzpatrick's link between an anxiety about the displacement of male privilige and the fear of new media technology in postmodern fiction.

Scott Hermanson presents a dialogue he conducted with novelists Richard Powers and Tom LeClair, at the University of Cincinnati in 2005. Moderated by Hermanson, the novelists discuss the intricacies of writing about nature, the role of history in the novel, and their fictions' use of imitative form.