11-03-2011

A New "Gospel of the Three Dimensions": Expanding the Boundaries of Digital Literature in Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla's Beyond the Screen

Just when you thought you were used to electronic literature, this critic makes the case for "beyond the screen" with a review of Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla's book of the same title, focusing on "transformations of literary structures, interfaces and genre."

10-19-2011

"You are cordially invited to a / CHEMICAL WEDDING": Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon's Cobralingus

How does a sample of de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater give birth to a mutant, six-fingered hand? This essay articulates the logic of Noon's 2001 experiment in constrained writing, which concretizes the play of signal and noise, pattern and randomness, in the flow of information. In the process, the critic suggests, Noon dramatizes how printed texts rupture and reassemble when they are transferred to electronic media.

10-30-2011

Anomalies

From the heavens to the stars, the number three has often been tied to the occult. Carrying on this tradition, Rob Swigart has brought together three books that investigate the anomalous, address the unexplained, and answer the impossible. The truth is in here.

09-14-2011

Review of Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

Beginning his review by reflecting on the book's cover art, John Bruni speculates that a punk aesthetic runs throughout Alaimo's posthuman environmentalism. Providing brief treatments of each chapter, he argues that the book's trans-corporeal understanding of the relationship between bodies and places disrupts "the very heart of what we know about ourselves."

09-07-2011

Finding the Human in "the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world": Embodiment, Place, and Materiality in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures

In this review Veronica Vold charts the posthuman environmental ethic in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and notes how the text draws together issues of race, (dis)ability, and the environment in a way that disrupts the boundaries between bodies and places.

10-25-2011

Due Diligence

Too much about too little, and too little about too much. Reviewing the new critical collection Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives, this critic finds evidence of overproduction in the "Pyndustry."

10-24-2011

A Review of Brian Lennon's In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States

Literature joins the living dead. A critic illuminates Brian Lennon's "scene" of literature today: both suspended and emergent in the world system.

10-17-2011

How to Fail (at) Fiction and Influence Everybody: A Review of Penthouse-F by Richard Kalich

Richard Kalich's latest protagonist is Richard Kalich, but one critic views this postmodern occupation of the novel as an opportunity - even an encouragement - to forget about him.

10-24-2011

"With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be": An Interview with Zoe Beloff

Jussi Parikka interviews artist Zoe Beloff about her relationship to the emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies known as media archaeology. In way of response, Beloff discusses some past works, including: Lost (1995), Shadow Land (2000), Claire and Don in Slumberland (2002), Charming Augustine (2005), The Somnambulists (2008), and The Dream Films (2009).

10-12-2011

See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen while he simultaneously uses the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.

10-04-2011

Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Four Introduction

Reviewing the week's discussion of Programmed Visions, Sarah Zurhellen finds a pleasurable respite that, necessarily, generated as many questions as answers.

10-03-2011

Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Four Discussion

In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's "On Sourcery and Source Codes," the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun's psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible.