Initially presented as a thread in two parts, green and grey, Critical Ecologies continues to explore convergences among natural and constructed ecosystems, green politics and grey matter, silicon chips and sand. A 2004 Festschrift, with over a dozen essays on Joseph McElroy, hints at the literary implications of an ecological, medial turn in literary theory.

Roderick Coover, Larry McCaffery, Lance Newman and Hikmet Loe: A Dialogue about the Desert.

Roderick Coover, Larry McCaffery, Lance Newman and Hikmet Loe explore the question of how desert ecologies are shaped through creative expression and actions. They consider, among others, how works by Edward Abbey, Robert Smithson and William T. Vollmann offer models for engaging ecological questions through writing and art.

Ebooks, Libraries, and Feelies

Countering the persistent popular notion that electronic literature is just reading the classics under glass, Daniel Punday advocates for greater innovation, and more authorial autonomy, at the level of book design. Insisting on "authors' rights to design the interface through which readers encounter their books," Punday argues that digital book publishing should strive to emulate the medial status of games, "which remain messy individuals."

Forgetting Media Studies: Anthologies, Archives, Anachrony

Through a close formal analysis of two new critical collections, Paul Benzon ponders the state of media studies as field. Exploring the material and temporal paradoxes of anthologizing new media and posthumanism, he argues that "each of these texts takes shape, succeeds, and fails under the pressures and possibilities posed by the scalar demands of information."

Charles Darwin: Conservative Messiah? On Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism

Bruce Clarke reviews Joseph Caroll's Literary Darwinism and (like Laura Walls in her review of E.O. Wilson ten years earlier in ebr) identifies the LD project not as "consilience" so much as the colonization of the literary humanities by one branch of the biological sciences. In Caroll, Clarke discerns a Darwinian fundamentalism to match the Christian fundamentalism that can be observed in Clarke's own Lubbock, TX habitat.

Beyond Representation: Deliberate Reading in a Panarchic World

Laura Dassow Walls explores how 'deliberative' reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.

Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in America and Germany

John Durham Peters outlines "the media studies triangle," which consists of textual, social, and institutional approaches. He then stakes out another approach that considers what civilization itself has at stake in media change.

Locating the Literary in New Media

Joseph Tabbi surveys four recent interventions into new media studies, and argues that literary critics should not forget the power of the written word to resist the circumscribed possibilities of the current mediasphere.

Inside God's Toolbox

Jon Adams rifles through the instrument cabinet of the man upstairs by way of William J. Jackson's Heaven's Fractal Net. Adams finds more problems than solutions in Jackson's position that fractals are a fundamental and universal structure of life - a position Jackson stakes out by vacillating between scholarly proof and speculative guruism.

A Critical Notice on a Book on Primates and Philosophers

Paola Cavalieri challenges the book's notion that human superior ethical worth can be preserved.

How to Do Words with Things

One of a series of eco-critical reviews, Stephen Dougherty explores the new ways that "matter is made to matter" in Ira Livingston's writing on science and literature. The payoff of an ecocriticism grounded in the materiality of language itself, can bee seen by the strong political positioning toward the end of Dougherty's essay.

On Being Difficult

Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism and self-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military 'World Target' that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework for knowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.

Critical Ecologies: Ten Years Later

Andrew McMurry looks back on ten years of ecocriticism and identifies a "new physiocracy," whose exclusive interest in technology is no better than the exclusive valuation of property that typified physiocrats of the Nineteenth-Century.

Gaia Matters

Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding's Animate Earth and James Lovelock's recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.

Systems Theory for Ecocriticism

Reviewing Andrew McMurry's Environmental Renaissance, Stephen Dougherty questions the systems approach to ecocriticism.

Introduction - Illuminated Criticism

Andrew McMurry introduces Katherine Acheson's review of Radiant Textuality, declaring that Acheson's illuminated critique exemplifies what's missing in McGann: the use of design not just to illustrate prose but also to extend a textual engagement.

Multimedia Textuality; or, an Oxymoron for the Present

Katherine Acheson's free-standing hypertext demonstrates how design can reinforce what's said, offer a counterpoint, and, occasionally, convey a critique of the critic.

Awesome and Terrifying

In his review of Lee Rozelle's Ecosublime, Andrew McMurry offers a contrasting understanding of the sublime as a term describing our closure to nature, not our openness.

Not Just a River

Rob Swigart asks why we keep hearing about a technological fix (dubious) and rarely about adaptation as a viable response to global warming.

Anatomizing the Language of Love: An Interview with Lee Siegel

Stephen J. Burn interviews fiction writer Lee Siegel.

Modernism Reevaluated

Walton Muyumba reviews two books: Michael Soto's The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance and American Literature (2004) and Manuel Martinez's Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera (2003).

Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine

Davis Schneiderman revisits the non-debate between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, touches on recent flare-ups in the American Book Review and the NOW WHAT blog, and reflects on the economy of book jacket blurbs.

Free Culture and Our Public Needs

Francis Raven reviews Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

Free as in Free Culture: A Response to Francis Raven

Benjamin J. Robertson responds to Francis Raven's review of Lessig's Free Culture. Writing against Raven, he outlines the ways in which Lessig's work is crucial for our current cultural moment.

Of the Cliché and the Everyday

Christopher Leise reviews Kenneth Bernard's The Man in the Stretcher and Richard Kalich's Charlie P, a work that is as much interested in the idea of the novel as it is a novel of ideas.

The Importance of Being Narratological

Dave Ciccoricco responds to Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck.

The Cheshire Cat's Grin

Diana Lobb responds to Katherine Hayles and ponders the ambiguities of dialogue.

Visiting Wonderland

Katherine Hayles responds to Diana Lobb.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Diana Lobb tackles the legacy of positivism and the politics of chaotics.

All of Us

William Major measures academic "ecocriticism" against the practical "agrarianism" of Wendell Berry.

Celebrating Complexity

Stephen Schryer reviews Mark Taylor and casts a critical eye on the unconditional celebration of complexity.

Form and Emotion

Author Lucy Corin opposes the emotionalism of genre fiction to the deeply emotional formalism in the fiction of Harold Jaffe, Patricia Eakins, and Janet Kauffman.

Meditations on the Blip: a review

Lisette Gonzales reviews a book of essays by Matthew Fuller that examines the way we are programmed by software.

Mister Squishy, c'est moi: David Foster Wallace's Oblivion

Kiki Benzon on narrative ecology and the "fradulence paradox" of Oblivion.

a Joseph McElroy festschrift

Andrew Walser introduces a gathering of essays on and by the novelist Joseph McElroy.

How to Avoid Being Paranoid

"Sedgwick's emphasis is on generating concepts that add to the complexity and inclusiveness of our representations, rather than trying to prescribe the right revolutionary path." Melissa Gregg reviews Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling.

If It Could Be Wrapped

Excerpted from Water Writing - an essay; presented as part of the ebr Critical Ecologies thread; concurrent with a literary Festschrift in honor of Joseph McElroy's lifework.

A Poetry of Noesis

On Joseph McElroy's Fiction as a lifelong, dramatic investigation of noesis - that abstract but evocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined(through Phenomenology) as those ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality.

History as Accretion and Excavation

Paul Gleason on Joseph McElroy's mid-career epic, Women and Men, as contrasted with Don DeLillo's Underworld.

McElroy's "Letter"

Charles Molesworth on style and spatial form in McElroy's Letter Left to Me, a novel whose poetic making is also an ethical growth.

Re-opening Hind's Kidnap

Joseph Milazzo writes about one of the least written about books by Joseph McElroy.

Joseph McElroy's Cyborg Plus

Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.

Vectoral Muscle in a Great Field of Process

Yves Abrioux approaches Woman and Men (1987) as an extended novelistic medition on cognition and action.

Front to the Future: Joseph McElroy's Ancient History

Ian Demsky on Joseph McElroy's Ancient History and welcome interruptions.

Fingering Prefiguring

Alex Reid examines a cross-section of essays in Prefiguring Cyberculture, a work that historicizes the future as neither alarmist nor utopian.

Optical Media Archaeologies

Anthony Enns juxtaposes two models of German media theory in reviewing new works by Oliver Grau and Friedrich Kittler.

Histories of the Present

Darren Tofts reviews a popularization by Marie O'Mahony and an auto-critique of cyberculture by Andrew Murphie and John Potts.

Words and Syllables

Sven Philipp on Cosmopolis and what seems to be a new stage in the critical reception of DeLillo.

Racial Remix

Regarding a monumental work on race, time, and classical music that does not lose sight of individual, localized lives.

The Question of the Animal

On a posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.

Manuel DeLanda's Art of Assembly

Aaron Pease reviews Manual DeLanda's philosophy of the virtual.

The Godfather Seen Through The Lens of Elite Criticism (and Vice Versa)

Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The World is Flat

According to Amy Elias, Paul Maltby's negation of the mystical Other forecloses 'the most interesting conversation': between a critic who does not believe in visionary moments and those writers and critics who do believe in them.

Metahistorical Romance

On Amy Elias's view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott's early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.

Printed Privileges

Carsten Schinko on Niklas Luhmann's Analogue Loyalty.

New Media and Old: The Limits of Continuity

Lev Manovich makes the first sustained case for a new media theory, but with cinema as his starting point he has a hard time engaging the non-representational artforms and aural explorations to be found there. So argues the Australian media writer, geniwate.

Tales of Almost

Linda Carolli on the third hybrid collection by Michael Joyce, a work (like the technological landscape it's about) at once industrial and informatic, essayistic and narrative, technical and autobiographical.

Metaphysics after the Western Wall Has Come Down

Polymythic Personalistic Organicism, Biocentric Egalitarianism, and the Postmodern Return to Religion.

Slow, Spare, and Painful

Steffen Hantke reviews the reviewers of Don DeLillo's Body Artist, dispelling the notion that, after Underworld, the shorter book is necessarily a slighter one.

Language Liquor

A revaluation and appreciation of Stanley Elkin on the occasion of the Dalkey Archive reprinting of four separate volumes.

The Cybernetic Turn: Literary into Cultural Criticism

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

What Lies Beneath?

Gene Kannenberg, Jr. finds the most well-publicized comic by one of America's most significant cartoonists to be technically accomplished, challenging as narrative but finally all too true to its title: the characters and situations in David Boring are in fact boring.

Re-Clearing the Ground: A Response to Linda Brigham

Mark Hansen responds to Linda Brigham's review of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing.

Further Notes From the Prison-House of Language

Linda Brigham works through Embodying Technesis by Mark Hansen.

Mindful of Multiplicity

Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.

Merely Extraordinary Beings

Elizabeth Wall Hinds reviews Andrew Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, winner of the James Black Memorial Fiction Prize and the 1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Hollywood Nomadology?

Linda Brigham offers a Deleuzean take on Independence Day.

After the Post

For Daniel Punday, Bernard Siegert's historical materialism - a difficult synthesis of historical, literary, and institutional analysis - falls somewhere between Derrida and Foucault. But see also the review in ebr by historian Richard John, who considers Siegert in the line of Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Harold Innis.

German TV Troubles

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young takes the outside perspective on German media studies.

The Runoff: A Simple Electoral Reform

Every crank has an idea. Every American is a crank. Philip Wohlstetter is an American, therefore - well, you get the idea.

Hope for Empowerment, Fear of Control

Jan van Looy reviews Silvio Gaggi on hypertext fiction up to the early '90s.

Materialities and the Raw Material of Latin Americanism

Shirin Shenassa situates Roman de la Campa's Latin Americanism within the critical discourses of the world's metropolitan centers and introduces a new thREAD into ebr's Internet Nation series

The Medial Turn

Joseph Tabbi identifies a shift in U.S. criticism that has taken place in the eight years separating Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe and John Johnston's Information Multiplicity.

Friedrich Kittler's Technosublime

Bruce Clarke reviews the new translation of Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, a requiem and good-riddance for the era of so-called Man.

Digital vs. Traditional?

Luc Herman reviews the collection, Cyberspace Textuality by Marie-Laure Ryan, and warns against the creation of a false dichotomy between the digital and traditional print text.

Consilience Revisited

Laura Dassow Walls reconsiders Consilience and finds E. O. Wilson to be more Christian in outlook than the Reverend William Whewell, who originated the term, 'consilience'

Conspiracy and the Populist Imagination

Timothy Melley reviews Mark Fenster on conspiracies in fact and fiction and finds evidence against the assumption that only nonexistent conspiracies produce conspiracy theories.

Jan Baetens asks Remediation or Premeditation?

Noting that media are not only proposed to readers but also imposed on customers, Jan Baetens introduces Adorno into the debates on remediation.

Media, Genealogy, History

Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Remediation by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter.

Are We Posthuman Yet?

Linda Brigham reads How We Became Posthuman the way Katherine Hayles reads novels: as a story that resists both linearity and the analytical ardor of attempts at humanist ordering.

Blackness and the Migratory Drive

Walton Muyumba reviews Randall Kenan's massive meditation on race and introduces a new word into the discourse on African American literature: zugenruhe.

On Spheres

Luca Di Blasi reads Peter Sloterdijk straight. Translation by Chris Thomas

Perloff in the Nineties

David Zauhar reads Marjorie Perloff the way she reads poetry and philosophy: as ways of doing, rather than saying

Materialism at the Millennium

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young gets inside De Landa's total history.

Enthralled by Systems

Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair's first novel, Passing Off (1996).

Hypertext '97

John Cayley reviews the Hypertext '97 Conference, which brought together representatives from corporate and academic sectors.

Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and The Poverty of Humanism

Cary Wolfe reviews Luc Ferry's The New Ecological Order.

Never Coming Home: Positivism, Ecology, and Rootless Cosmopolitanism

Steven Kellert on being "in favor of universals."

The 'Environment' Is Us

Taking up the green thread from ebr4, Harold Fromm reviews three new books of eco-criticism >--- ebr4 critical ecologies

The Cybernetic Turn: Literary into Cultural Criticism

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

Poets Take On Guess Inc.: Poets Win

Poets Take On Guess Inc.: Poets Win

Restoring Dora Marsden

Michael Wutz reviews Bruce Clarke's Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science

Attractions Around Mount St. Helens

Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.

Joseph McElroy: fathoming the field

Toward a definition of a postmodern genre: the field-novel.

Post-Wankery: A Review of Infinite Jest

Piotr Siemion discusses Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Canadian Jeremiad

Andrew McMurry reviews John Livingstone's Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication.

Scared Straight

Carol Stabile reviews Our Stolen Future.

Ecotourism: Notes on Con-temporary Travel

Thomas Cohen on ecotourism in Bolivia and discovering the post-humans of the past.

From Virtual Reality to Phantomatics and Back

Paisley Livingston on Stanislaw Lem and the history and philosphy of Virtual Reality.

Anti-Negroponte: Cybernetic Subjectivity in Digital Being and Time

Timothy Luke reviews Nicholas Negroponte and takes a second look at 'digital subjectivity.'

HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary

Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.

Critical Ecologies

An art installation as much as an "issue," the original site for ebr4, Critical Ecologies, used variations on a concrete poem by Daniel Wenk to guide readers through the "green" and "gray" essays. Another innovation was the introduction of the riposte section.

Cyborg Anthropology

Matthew Fuller on The Cyborg Handbook.

Stanley Fish and the Place of Criticism

Christopher Knight on Stanley Fish's Professional Correctness.

Observing the Observers of Systems and Environments

Linda Brigham reviews the Spring and Fall 1995 issues of Cultural Critique.

Selling Out in a Buyer's Market

Michael Bérubé responds to the respondents in Selling Out (Spring 1996).

who is michael bérubé and why is he saying these terrible things about us?

Joe Amato muses on academic stardom, the poetics list, and the corporation that motors his university.

Exterminate the Brutes: Fighting Back Against the Right

Should the Left pool its resources and buy CBS? Robert Markley offers strategies for avoiding Patrick Buchanan's jihad.

Virtual Communities?: Public Spheres and Public Intellectuals on the Internet

Can electronic conversations reconstitute Bérubé's lost public sphere? A Marxist analysis by Jamie Daniel.

Getting the Dirt on The Public Intellectual: A response to Michael Bérubé

Cary Wolfe lays bare the assumptions that define Bérubé's stance.

On Netscape, Virtual Slaves, and Making Moolah

Mark Amerika goes public, and reveals speculative fiction and market speculations to be one and the same.

Something Is Happening, Mr. Jones

Marjorie Perloff on the surprising viability of art and poetry - everywhere but in universities.

Them, Meaning Us

Former FC2 Co-publisher Curtis White defends radical fiction against Left radical intellectuals.

A Project for a New Consultancy

Joseph Tabbi and Gregory Ulmer discuss what intellectual work will be like in the new electracy.

Writing the Paradigm

An overview of Gregory Ulmer's thought by Victor Vitanza.

No More Heroes

David Cassuto reviews Wild Ideas, a collection of ecocritical essays.

Wild Ambitions

David Cassuto reviews Wild Ideas, a collection of ecocritical essays.

Cultural Criticism and The Politics of Selling Out

In this feature essay from the spring of 1996, Michael Bérubé claimed that left intellectuals have little choice but to sell out, if they want to make a difference in the culture they critique. But which way is out? And who gets to go public?

Academia, Inc.

Linda Brigham reviews Incorporations, the most recent collection from Zone Books.

The Revolution May Not Be Computerized

Daniel Riess on Roger Chartier's media history.

Designing Our Disciplines in a Postmodern Age - and Academy

Matt Kirschenbaum on Richard Coyne's philosophical treatment of technographics.

Cyberinthian Ways

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.

Sleepless in Seattle

Paul Harris explores IN.S.OMNIA's technographies.