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.
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.
On posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.
Taking up the green thread from ebr4, Harold Fromm reviews three new books of eco-criticism >— ebr4 critical ecologies
Books dealing with ecology and environment are now a vast industry, an avalanche of information and opinion that exceeds anybody’s ken. The “environment” itself keeps growing, enlarging, encompassing, so that the environment of 1998 is a very different thing from what it was on the first Earth Day in 1970. The sheer number of disciplines that has evolved since Aldo Leopold’s landmark Sand County Alamanc of 1949 is startling - environmental medicine, environmental history, environmental engineering, environmental ethics, social ecology, green travel, green farming, conservation biology, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, animal rights, to name a few - exceeding in subtlety and complexity such early concerns as emissions, toxic waste, acid rain, cancer clusters, etc. On the World Wide Web alone the information is daunting, hopeless, beyond belief.
In our multicultural world, the ecological situation differs drastically not only from country to country but from cultural persona to cultural persona. The “we” of deep ecology, as van Wyck likes to point out, is far from a unitary one. The end of the line for “we” speaking for the “other” and for unilateral definitions of reality is, of course, the manifesto of the Unabomber.
Diana Lobb tackles the legacy of positivism and the politics of chaotics.
Claire Rasmussen on geography and the social theory of Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Mike Davis, and Edward Soja.
Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Remediation by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter.
Remediation is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with Understanding Media (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for Remediation among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media.
Cary Wolfe reviews Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order.
Early on in The New Ecological Order, French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and the danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is that it can call itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought… At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal (xx).
As we shall see, for Ferry – a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not Cartesian tradition – this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism.
Taking up the green thread from ebr4, Harold Fromm reviews three new books of eco-criticism >— ebr4 critical ecologies
Books dealing with ecology and environment are now a vast industry, an avalanche of information and opinion that exceeds anybody’s ken. The “environment” itself keeps growing, enlarging, encompassing, so that the environment of 1998 is a very different thing from what it was on the first Earth Day in 1970. The sheer number of disciplines that has evolved since Aldo Leopold’s landmark Sand County Alamanc of 1949 is startling - environmental medicine, environmental history, environmental engineering, environmental ethics, social ecology, green travel, green farming, conservation biology, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, animal rights, to name a few - exceeding in subtlety and complexity such early concerns as emissions, toxic waste, acid rain, cancer clusters, etc. On the World Wide Web alone the information is daunting, hopeless, beyond belief.
After the Industrial Revolution, human beings came to be seen as more or less autonomous creatures who had been placed in an “environment” that they could use as they wished or even, in some perverse sense, do without.
Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism andself-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military ‘WorldTarget’ that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework forknowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/transitive)