Article in an online journal

Afterthoughts on the end of the sixties, the death of the author, the rise of Theory and the fall of humanism.

Source: Author's abstract

In this review of Rethinking the New Medievalism, Matt Cohen ponders the significance of philology’s ongoing period of “reflection, […] refraction, and revisitation.” Against the backdrop of contemporary shifts in the humanities, more generally, Cohen sees opportunities for medievalists to intervene, bringing with them both clarity and innovation to fields in a state of fluctuation.

Source: Author's abstract

In this review of O’Nan’s West of Sunset, Messenger explores 20th Century American literary history as a kind of contemporary metafictional myth. Using Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as characters composing the life of a literary icon against the emergence of “Hollywood,” O’Nan’s work is considered a bittersweet meditation on the death of an author and the hope that his work lives on.

Source: Author’s Abstract

Eric Zimmerman describes his interactive paper book as “an inverted exquisite corpse,” and although a digital version of the book would be easy to produce, he argues that an electronic edition would not produce as meaningful an experience as the printed volume.

Kim Newman describes various methods of approaching his choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, which can be read or played because, like a role-playing game, “you are at once a reader and the main character.”

Using Exalted as her text, Rebecca Borgstrom begins with the premises that every role-playing game requires a setting, and that to establish a fictional world players work within a mutually agreed upon structure to construct meaning.

Using Exalted as her text, Rebecca Borgstrom begins with the premises that every role-playing game requires a setting, and that to establish a fictional world players work within a mutually agreed upon structure to construct meaning.

James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.

Will Hindmarch contests Greg Costikyan’s challenge to the idea that “games have something to do with stories” by contending that “storytelling games reconcile the theoretically antithetical relationship between their two halves - story and game.”

Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding’s Animate Earth and James Lovelock’s recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/looped)