For many who are committed to working in electronic environments, an electronic "review" might better be named a "retrospective," a mere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. There's a technological subtext to the declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring that subtext to the surface will be part of ebr's agenda.

Ping Poetics

Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer "ping trace" can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation.

Against Digital Poetics

Sandy Baldwin explores the distinctions between non-digital poetry, digital poetry, and e-literature in general, and considers whether or not such distinctions are ultimately untenable.

Text, Textile, Exile: Meditations on Poetics, Metaphor, Net-work

"Man Ray, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, themes of disorientation, displacement, diaspora, defamiliarized language" and that's just the d's. With such "little clues, like stitches coding a special language," Maria Damen weaves an essay-narrative based on her Summer 2007 residency in Riga, Latvia.

On an Unhuman Earth

"Why shouldn't Wordsworth be read through Whitehead? Why shouldn't the canon of Romantic poetry be read alongside the inscription technologies of cartography or tour guides?" Eugene Thacker's challenge to the recent compartmentalization of academic literary studies is inspired by a reading of Ron Broglio's book, Technologies of the Picturesque. For Thacker, as for Broglio, literary Romanticism and phenomenological reflection are not the only unifying forces against the dissolution of the technological subject.

A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Digital Poetics

Michael McDonough reviews Brian Kim Stefans' book of poetry Before Starting Over, asserting that Stefans is concerned with the redefinition of critical discourse in the face of the loss of the singularity of the work of art. Stefans is not out to substitute an ideology of surface and take our deep meanings away. He mines contemporary poetics with an encyclopedic attention while resisting dogmatic assertions.

Either You're With Us and Against Us: Charles Bernstein's Girly Man, 9-11, and the Brechtian Figure of the Reader

Tim Peterson brilliantly lays out for us how Charles Bernstein's Girly Man represents the mobilization of queer rhetoric, iconoclastic values, and an implied notion of the family in the figure of the Girly Man.

Introduction: ceci n'est pas un texte

Lori Emerson introduces a gathering of nineteen electro-poetic essays. This gathering brings together both critics and creators of electronic poetry; as is usually the case in ebr, the 'electronic' does not exclude, but helps us to reconfigure and revalue poetic works in print as well as define what works in digital environments.

Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren't You the Kind that Tells: My Sentimental Journey through Future Shock and Present Static Electricity. Version 19.84

Charles Bernstein. Keyword: speed. Speed as a morally coded concept. Speed as success. An ethics of speed. Speed-reading. Virtual reading. Cultural speed-up. Speed kills.

The Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of Strickland's V

Reading Stephanie Strickland's V: Losing L'una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse, Jaishree Odin explores the implications of the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity for our understanding of reading, writing and living.

Robert Creeley's Radical Poetics

Marjorie Perloff reflects on the legacy of misreadings of Robert Creeley's work and argues that his complex poetics should be read transnationally.

An Inside and an Outside

In his review of two of Robert Creeley's last published books, Douglas Manson urges us to read these late poems as sending ideas outward, toward an "outside," so that we begin gathering in tomes, searching for quotes.

Perloff on Pedagogical Process: Reading as Learning

Douglas Barbour reads Marjorie Perloff's Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy as a notable addition to her oeuvre, another grab-bag of pertinent, impertinent, and always provocative readings of both a wide range of works and some of the social/cultural contexts in which we read them.

Literature from Page to Interface: The Treatments of Text in Christophe Bruno's Iterature

Søren Pold explores the ways in which Christophe Bruno's Iterature expands the notion of literary form and shows what happens when words are no longer only part of a language.

How to Think (with) Thinkertoys: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1

Adalaide Morris considers 'tutor texts' in the Electronic Literature Collection and, in doing so, articulates a poetics for the emerging field of e-lit. Instead of fulfilling Ted Nelson's dream of 'computer lib,' the most compelling entries in the Collection emphasize the continuing necessity of writing under constraint. When the revolution turns out to be, not a liberation from a culture of control but its transformation, practices long familiar to experimental poets in print become generalized throughout new media and their panoply of 'thinkertoys.'

Letters That Matter: The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1

John Zuern considers the significance of the first volume of ELO's Electronic Literature Collection for the future of electronic arts.

Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before)

Chris Funkhouser reads the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 as a crucial document, an effective reflection of literary expression and areas of textual exploration in digital form.

Biopoetics; or, a Pilot Plan for a Concrete Poetry

Eugene Thacker resituates the work of Eduardo Kac, not as art applied to the life sciences, but as a form of bio-poetics, consistent with the electro-poetics that has been a longtime focus of critical writing in ebr. Rather than reduce the work to its material (in life-forms, or in text, or in code), Thacker identifies ways that language, form, and life intersect in works of bio-art.

Art, Empire, Industry: The Importance of Eduardo Kac

Sandy Baldwin identifies Eduardo Kac as a conceptual artist, a forerunner of electronic poetry, and a critical writer whose essays perform their own content: "writing on new media art as new media art."

Eshleman's Caves: a review of JUNIPER FUSE

For Jay Murphy, Clayton Eshleman in his JUNIPER FUSE makes a resounding case for lived experience, for the tortuous growth, however partial or fragmented, as rooted in self-suffering as modes of vision and dream.

The Linguistic Cartography of Toilets and Ginger Ale

For Angela Szczepaniak, Canadian poet Stephen Cain visually distorts language by blurring the borders of poetic language and national identity, which are often assumed to be much more clear and distinct than they actually are.

Three from The Gig: New Work By/About Maggie O'Sullivan, Allan Fisher, and Tom Raworth

Three recent poetry publications by Nate Dorward's press The Gig are reviewed by Greg Betts; these are not poems so much as environments outside of, perhaps astride, the contingencies of systems.

Soft Links of Innovative Narrative in North America

The collection of innovative writing Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative is, for Janet Neigh, also a refreshing example of innovation of the anthology genre itself.

Seeing the novel in the 21st Century

Mike Barrett evaluates Steve Tomasula's The Book of Portraiture in terms of its place between tradition and artistic innovation in the 21st century.

The Comedy of Scholarship

Katherine Weiss revisits Hugh Kenner's playful work of scholarship Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians, a book which offers a glance into the more experimental scholarship of 1960s France and provides an analysis that to this day seems original.

The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan's Idea of Form

In a reading of Christopher Nolan's films (with and against texts by Poe, Wittgenstein, Searle, and Derrida), Walter Benn Michaels examines the autonomy of the work of art.

The Gesture of Explanation Without Intelligibility: Ronald Schleifer's Analogical Thinking

Stephen Hawkins reviews Ronald Schleifer's Analogical Thinking, arguing that despite Schleifer's attempts at interdisciplinarity, his book falls short of a truly collaborative approach.

Saving the Past: Deleuze's Proust and Signs

Stephen Hawkins engages with the "web of counterintuitive, paradoxical, contentious and yet important claims" that he identifies in Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs.

Reading the Conflicting Reviews: The Naysayers Gerald Graff overlooked in Clueless in Academe

Geneviève Brassard defends Gerald Graff's original approaches in Clueless in Academe against his critics - for the problem with Graff's book does not lie between the covers but rather between the ears of those who fault him excessively for sins of omission and commission.

Illogic of Sense | The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix: Introduction

Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye introduce the collection of essays, appearing here in the electropoetics thread, from the Alt-x e-book The Illogic of Sense.

On Hip-Hop, A Rhapsody

Michael Jarrett practices an Ulmer-inspired heuretics to write about rap.

The King and I: Elvis and the Post-Mortem or A Discontinuous Narrative in Several Media (On the Way to Hypertext)

Niall Lucy enacts a writing that weaves critical and theoretical speculation, rock journalism, hagiography and autobiography.

StudioLab UMBRELLA

Jon McKenzie, a former student of Gregory Ulmer's, traces the relations of influence and mentorship.

From Mystorian to Curmudgeon: Skulking Toward Finitude

Marcel O'Gorman offers a candid account of what it means to introduce the computer apparatus into teaching in the humanities.

The Two Ulmers in e-Media Studies: Vehicle and Driver

Craig Saper ingeniously interprets Gregory Ulmer as an object of study, as both a vehicle and driver of signification.

SURFACE TO SURFACE, ASHES TO ASHES (REPORTING TO U)

Linda Marie Walker writes an involved meditation on the concept of the interface and its relation to place.

Diagrammatology

Rowan Wilken sets himself the challenge of theorizing the unrepresentable in relation to the architectural model of the diagram.

The Way We Live Now, What is to be Done?

Jerome McGann addresses the so-called "Crisis in the Humanities" in the context of two of its most apparent symptoms: the digital transformation of our museums and archives, and the explicitly parallel "Crisis in Tenure and Publishing" that has more recently come to attention.

Critical Code Studies

Entering the 'cyberdebates' initiated by Nick Montfort, John Cayley, and Rita Rayley, new media scholar Mark Marino proposes that we should analyse and explicate code as a text like any other, 'a sign system with its own rhetoric' and cultural embeddedness.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Mothers?

Linda Brigham reviews Katherine Hayles' My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.

Finding Holes in the Whole

Jacob Edmond reviews Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole.

Recto and Sub-Verso

Eckhard Gerdes reviews Harold Jaffe's Terror-Dot-Gov: Docufictions.

Virtual Realism

Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck review Marie Laure-Ryan's Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. They review the essential characteristics of hypertext to suggest more nuanced ways to understand realism in relation to virtual reality.

Bass Resonance

1999 e-literature award winner John Cayley writes about Saul Bass of classic film title fame. A precursor to language arts innovators Jenny Holzer, Richard Kostelanetz, and Cayley himself, Bass may now be recognized as a poet in his own 'write,' important for a new generation of designwriters creating "graphic bodies of language," moving words and signifying images, in digital environments.

Querying the Connoisseur of Chaos

A Wallace Stevens conference review from poet and critic Ravi Shankar.

Being Inside the Sentence

Gregg Biglieri reads "into" Actress in the House and revels in Joseph McElroy's syntax.

Public Fiction

A Response to Rone Shavers and impromptu review of Harold Jaffe's latest book, 15 Serial Killers, latest entry in the "literature of witness."

Confronting Chaos

Joseph Tabbi reviews Joe Conte's Design and Debris and gauges the argument for chaotics-as-aesthetics across media.

In My Own Recognizance

Ronald Sukenick on Extreme Fiction.

Shadow Dance

In looking to the future of the 'electronic book,' Ciccoricco digs up some of ebr's manifesto-like remarks of old.

Electronic Books?

Stuart Moulthrop re-opens the debate on the "electronic book" and its continued marginalization vis-a vis print.

The Contour of a Contour

Despite talk of endings and absences at Eastgate Systems, Dave Ciccoricco investigates continuities in the work of Michael Joyce and Mark Bernstein.

Mimicries

Rone Shavers argues that making readers aware of subjugation - the strategy of Harold Jaffe's False Positive - exposes little and hardly changes our relation to power.

Pervaded by Epistemology

A review of Writing Machines, building on a number of the book's earlier reviewers in ebr and elsewhere.

Positioning Hypertext in Chomsky's Hierarchy of Grammars

Jim Rosenberg sends a shot of grammar straight across the bow of Nick Montfort's controversial Cybertext review, adding volume to a volley already in progress

New Media Studies

Scott Rettberg introduces 'New Media Studies': a cluster of reviews, and a term (similar in its emergence to the term 'Postmodernism').

The Materiality of Technotexts

A book about books conscious of their materiality, N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines draws praise from Raine Koskimaa for its own media consciousness, and blame for embodied emphasis.

A User's Guide to the New Millennium

Over 800 pages, the New Media Reader does not exhaust its subject; it even sets the stage for a companion volume.

Bridge Work

Form and platform are bridged in Stephanie Strickland's "V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una," a book with two beginings and a website to boot. Chris Funkhouser tests the load limit of this innovative, precarious structure.

Justin Hall and the Birth of the 'Blogs

Rob Wittig looks at one of the earliest "Weblogs," and finds there a persisting model for serial e-fiction and an interaction no less compelling than the literary correspondence between Henry Miller and Anais Nin.

Evangelizing the Everyday Web

Scott Rettberg appreciates Weinberg's small pieces more than his 'unified theory,' while viewing the Internet not as an economic panacea but a communication medium woven into the fabric of contemporary culture.

Kaye in Wonderland

Komninos Zervos reviews the Hayles/Burdick collaboration, Writing Machines (2003), and reengages the cyberdebates (initiated in Y2K).

The Museum of Hyphenated Media

New media in a book, metafiction in hypertext: the printed book, as yet, is the more hospitable medium. (The New Media Reader; Figurski at Findhorn on Acid.)

The Code is not the Text (unless it is the Text)

An argument against the collapse of categories by an author who has, yes, himself perpetrated a few codeworks.

The Poetry of John Matthias

A generous selection, with commentary and biographical background, for those coming newly to Matthias's work.

Interferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codework

Rita Raley on the varieties of code/text, as discovered in the object-oriented aesthetic of Mez, Ted Warnell, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, and others.

The Rules of the Game

Virginia Kuhn reviews an essay collection - Cybertext: Yearbook 2000 - ambivalent about its own printed status.

Intersection and Struggle: Poetry In a New Landscape

Brandon Barr considers Loss Glazier's attempt at a hypertext poetics that moves beyond the link.

Shopping for Truth

Adrien Gargett on Pierre Missac's unification of empirical biography and textual production, and the development of a "criticism of indirection" too often missing from Benjamin studies.

The Pleasure (and Pain) of Link Poetics

Entering the cyberdebates, Scott Rettberg moves beyond technique and proposes a more generative approach to hypertext, in which an author's intention and poetic purpose have a role.

Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Of

Following Katherine Hayles, Matthew Kirschenbaum agrees that materiality matters.

Accretive Dreams, Junk Narrativity, & Orphaned Excess in Moderation

Lance Olsen reviews hypertext writing, past and present, by Robert Arellano.

A Poetics of the Link

Jeff Parker contributes to the ongoing debate on electropoetics and invites readers to post their own link types and descriptions.

What Cybertext Theory Can't Do

A reluctant response to Markku Eskelinen.

Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying

Considering hypertext as a subset of cybertexts, Markku Eskelinen offers seven examples of how to implement Espen Aarseth's seven-fold typology.

Of Tea Cozy and Link

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink performs an autopsy on the hypertextual corpse.

Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide

In response to Nick Montfort's review of Cybertext, N. Katherine Hayles coins an alternative term, Cyber|literature.

No. No. [Novel not to die

Stacey Levine reviews Re.La.Vir by Jan Ramjerdi.

Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star

Nick Montfort reviews Espen J. Aarseth's Cybertext, which stakes out a post-hypertextual terrain for literary criticism and practice. Interactive excerpts from some of the cybertexts that Aarseth discusses are included.

To Be Both in Touch and in Control

Stephanie Strickland unravels the crochet of categorizations used to contain data, and explores the texture and topography of a hypertext poetics.

Ventriloquies: On the Outlook for a Poetic Planet

Against the literary history proposed by Marjorie Perloff, Shaw goes on the lookout for an Outlook that just might save poetry from contemporary theory.

La Vielle Porte and Other Poems

Raymond Federman compiles a small manual of poetic pleasures.

A Migration Between Media

Joseph Tabbi reads both the book and the hypertext version of Strickland's True North.

The Haunting of Benjamin Britten

John Matthias reflects on Humphrey Carpenter's biography of 1992, in light of earlier work by Auden and recent findings.

Reviewing the Reviewers of Literary Hypertexts

Thomas Swiss unravels Laura Miller's arguments in the New York Times Book Review and finds news of hypertext's demise premature - as was Robert Coover's call for the end of books five years ago in the same journal.

Seven League Boots: Poetry, Science, Hypertext

Stephanie Strickland asks how a poetics of hypertext can structure encounters with the world that are as resonant and co-participatory as quantum models.

Joel Felix posts a response

On the futures of electronic scholarship - an exchange among editors.

PMC editor Stuart Moulthrop responds

On the futures of electronic scholarship - an exchange among editors.

L'Affaire PMC: The Postmodern Culture-Johns Hopkins University Press Conversation

Joel Felix listens in on Postmodern Culture's privatization debate.

Richard Powers after Louis Zukofsky: A Prospectus of the Sky

From Zukofsky's "A" to Powers' Goldbug Variations, in search of a social ecology of the self-discursive text.

Poetry@The_Millennium: A Conversation with Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

A conversation with Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg on the technology and politics of the millenial anthology.

Poetry in the Electronic Environment

Stephanie Strickland on the translation of poetry from print to screen.

Whither Leads the Poem of Forking Paths?

On the present and future of hypertext poetics (circa 1997).

Slash and Burn

Harold Jaffe offers a narrative model for the millenium.

Why Did People Make Things Like This

A cyber (hyper) text reading through Copeland, Gibson, and Christopher Dewdney, with breaks for speculation on form and opacity. Is there a manifesto buried in here? You decide.

The Affective Interface

Lorne Falk retells the allegory of Arachne, the divine weaver, netted in le cabinet virtuel

Electropoetics

The second ebr special to employ the concrete poems of Daniel Wenk, working typographical variations on the term, "electropoetics." Guest edited by Joel Felix, who in 1997 was an undergraduate Lit major at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A Real Fictitious Interview Done by Smoke Signals

Millennial thoughts from Raymond Federman.

Un Policier sur la Police: The Gritty Reality Behind the Fonts You Read

on the ghost in the machine: the font as spiritual medium in CD-ROM poetry design

Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese

Oulipo poetics and the art of translation.

Key Concepts of Holopoetry

Artist Eduardo Kac writes on the attractions of the hologram as a malleable, fluid, and elastic medium for poetic expression.

British Poetry at Y2K

John Matthias reports on the state of British Poetry and its criticism.

Texts and Tools

Bringing the queston of 'textuality' into the cyberdebates, and refusing the conservative oppostion between contemplative reading and gaming, Daniel Punday argues that critics should embrace spinoff culture as a model for electronic writing.

Harry Partch - A Poet's View

Alan Shaw on the poetics of composer Harry Partch and the musicality of greek prosody.

Some Questions on Greek Poetry and Music

On the musicality of Greek prosody.

Engineering Cyborg Ideology

N. Katherine Hayles discusses what happens when postmodern writers theorize in a void.

ebr version 1.0: Winter 1995/96

From the start, the editors made it clear that the electronic book review would be about more than reviewing books.