Urging adaptibility and breadth, Mark Poster takes issue with the niches bored by early Internet critiques.
(Source: EBR)
In “Nothing Lasts,” Stephen Schryer considers Tom LeClair’s Passing On and The Liquidators as paired novels, one immersing the reader in the maelstrom of the social and economic systems that shape contemporary life, the other shielding the reader from those systems. Unlike the massive novels from the seventies that fascinated LeClair the critic, Schryer finds the novelist a “literary miniaturist,” seeking “concise synecdoches for the larger systems” his books evoke.
Amy J. Elias reviews Madhu Dubey’s second book Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism and gauges the argument that we can locate within literary history a distinctive African American strain of postmodernism.
Steven Shaviro reviews Shelley Jackson’s Half Life, the first print-based novel by a pioneering hypertextualist.
Tim Keane reviews David Matlin’s Prisons: Inside the New America.
Sascha Pöhlmann reviews Lance Olsen’s 2006 novel Nietzsche’s Kisses.
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.
Linda Brigham offers a Deleuzean take on Independence Day.
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.
Linda Carroli reviews Michael Joyce on networked culture, whose emergence changes our ideas of change.