Article in an online journal

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

Apologies: This is not a ‘balanced’ review of the Hypertext ‘97 conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged, ‘point of view’. I haven’t named all the names I should have or even many and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye (New York: ACM, 1997). My perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was written quickly as a draft towards a (probably shorter) review of the conference which is to be published in the UK-based periodical (presently a quarterly newspaper) of ‘digitalartcritique’ entitled Mute.

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.

Steven Kellert on being “in favor of universals.”

This is a hard time to be in favor of universals. If you argue for modern western science, context-free knowledge that is valid everywhere and for everyone, and universal norms and rights, you risk being labelled a liberal or even a Logical Positivist. Radical strains of science and technology studies have shown us that universalizing theories can slip into totalitarian imperatives, or falsely generalize by excluding oppressed groups, or abstract away from the very practices that make meaningful experience possible. Bioregionalism and deep ecology champion the importance of local context in matters both political and epistemological. But what if the Logical Positivists weren’t that bad? What if they were onto something–something worth keeping hold of? And what are the dangers of the contextual and the local?

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

About a year ago in a TLS review, the English novelist Lawrence Norfolk praised the emerging generation of U.S. writers for resisting the allure of the mediated culture and providing readers with “news of a rare and real America” (“Closing time in the fun-house”). Norfolk is thinking of William T. Vollmann’s red light districts (mostly cleaned up now and Hilton-ed over), Jonathan Franzen’s inner city (newly gentrified), Richard Powers’s intelligentsia (last seen working online), and David Foster Wallace’s mid-priced cruise ships, halfway houses, and rural state fairs (now mostly funded by corporations). Norfolk would probably oppose this America to the more globally familiar prospect of “total operationality, hyperreality, total control” and total interchangeability of sign and referent that Jean Baudrillard finds here, along with technology’s “mortal deconstruction of the body” (“Simulacra,” cited in Simulacrum America).

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.

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

Dora Marsden was not a madwoman in the attic. When she and her female compatriots climbed down from the attic of the Southport Empire theater on 3 December 1909 to disrupt a public appearance by Winston Churchill, she did so as a freewoman agitating for universal suffrage and gender equality. Soon she was to edit a short-lived journal by the same name, the Freewoman, to be renamed and reconceived as the New Freewoman and, eventually, the Egoist - three journals that were to have a formative impact on the literary and artistic configuration of modernism. Bruce Clarke retraces Marsden’s wide-ranging but hitherto largely unacknowledged influence on her modernist contemporaries and, in the spirit of revisionary literary and cultural criticism, seeks to correct “a tradition of misinformation” (4) that has led to a monolithic and largely masculinist construction of modern literature.

J. Hillis Miller looks at the “multimedia” Victorian novel, embodied in ink, paper, cardboard, and glue.

(Source: ebr)

In collecting essays for ebrs 6 and 7, the editors sought work that would not only talk about image and narrative theory in the networked environment; we wanted essays with design elements in their very construction. The essays were presented in the context of Anne Burdick’s first integral design for the journal itself, ebr version 2.0.

(Source: ebr)

The culmination of ebr version 2.0 (an html- and java-based Web production), the spring 1999 “gathering of threads” introduced an important component into the journal design: the thREAD that actively conducts readers among affiliated essays.

(Source: ebr)

Steffen Hantke presents an archeology of Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

(Source: ebr)