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.
Stephen Schryer reviews Mark Taylor and casts a critical eye on the unconditional celebration of complexity.
William Major measures academic “ecocriticism” against the practical “agrarianism” of Wendell Berry.
Diana Lobb tackles the legacy of positivism and the politics of chaotics.
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.
Francis Raven reviews Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.
Joyce’s treatment of baseball in Going the Distance isn’t merely thematic, according to Punday, who believes that baseball (and its emphasis on numerical ordering) here represents the balance of the poetic and computational that defines Joyce’s electronic literature.
Source: Author's abstract
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.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young gets inside De Landa’s total history.
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,‘To talk of many things:Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -Of cabbages - and kings -And why the sea is boiling hot -And whether pigs have wings.’Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Total history comes in waves. During the first decades of the twentieth century a number of prominent studies appeared that were written either by amateur historians such as Oswald Spengler or professionals like Arnold Toynbee and that mobilized a wide range of alternative disciplines in order to provide a new comprehensive view of history on a global scale. An ambitious commitment ‘to talk of many things’ - that is, to extend the domain of historiography far beyond its traditional boundaries - was linked to the elaboration of all-inclusive algorithms designed to account for the basic dynamics of history, be it the morphologically programmed blooming and withering of autonomous cultures in Spengler’s Decline of the West or the challenge-response scheme of Toynbee’s Study of History. Several reasons conspired to slow down the production of further such grand narratives following the Second World War, not the least of which was the increased institutionalization of historiography, but it appears that we are now caught up in a second wave of total histories. Once again, they are written by historians and non-historians alike, and once again the extension of the disciplinary boundaries is linked to a liberal import of ideas and methods from hitherto unrelated or ‘irrelevant’ fields.
.......what happened in Europe could have happened elsewhere, so there is no innate reason why Western Europe came to dominate the world the way it did. The potential problem is that despite this more open and relaxed view of global history Europe retains its privileged position. Once upon a time historians reduced history to an algorithm that regulated a predictable rise from barbarism to high culture with Europe as the supreme example against which all others had to be measured;
Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair’s first novel, Passing Off (1996).
Of the three major American team sports (Basketball, Baseball, Football), basketball is the only one that is wordless. Baseball is interpreted by language through an umpire’s balls and strikes, football sent into violent collision of bodies by a quarterback’s arcane jargon. Basketball, however, is the sport that at present remains a mystic’s communion, somewhere between a violent ballet and a transcendent praxis. Because of its silence, basketball has attracted only a fraction of the novelists (Updike in his Rabbit series the most prominent) who have memorialized baseball and football in the past few decades. That team roster is large and cuts across a popular and elite sampling of contemporary American fiction (Malamud, Roth, Coover, Charyn, Kinsella, DeLillo, Whitehead, Gent, Jenkins). Furthermore, basketball’s symbology and social relations have been almost totally appropriated by an African American standard of play, excellence, and cultural relevance, stipulating that white American authors must work out their own meaning now in a residual and somewhat tangential sense.