John Durham Peters outlines “the media studies triangle,” which consists of textual, social, and institutional approaches. He then stakes out another approach that considers what civilization itself has at stake in media change.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/myopic)
Laura Dassow Walls explores how ‘deliberative’ reading practices may allow us to weigh the words we hear against the world we cognize - keeping alive the possibility of reading as a moral act.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/deliberative)
Bruce Clarke reviews Joseph Caroll’s Literary Darwinism and (like Laura Walls in her review of E.O. Wilson ten years earlier in ebr) identifies the LD project not as “consilience” so much as the colonization of the literary humanities by one branch of the biological sciences. In Caroll, Clarke discerns a Darwinian fundamentalism to match the Christian fundamentalism that can be observed in Clarke’s own Lubbock, TX habitat.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/antimodern)
Through a close formal analysis of two new critical collections, Paul Benzon ponders the state of media studies as field. Exploring the material and temporal paradoxes of anthologizing new media and posthumanism, he argues that “each of these texts takes shape, succeeds, and fails under the pressures and possibilities posed by the scalar demands of information.”
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/forgetting)
Countering the persistent popular notion that electronic literature is just reading the classics under glass, Daniel Punday advocates for greater innovation, and more authorial autonomy, at the level of book design. Insisting on “authors’ rights to design the interface through which readers encounter their books,” Punday argues that digital book publishing should strive to emulate the medial status of games, “which remain messy individuals.”
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/modular)
Marc Bousquet discusses university labor delivered in “the mode of information.
(Source: EBR)
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin justify their focus on the experience of play over theory in their assemblage of the essays by game designers, players, and critics featured in Second Person - the book.
Kenneth Hite argues that the long-running, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu franchise differs from traditional tabletop role-playing in its focus on suspense rather than character growth. Hite’s analysis suggests that in its origins and emphasis on narrative structure Cthulhu is a highly literary game.
The reader steps to the fore in the final section of First Person, reconfigured and ready for interaction.
Reading subjectivity into the software interface, N. Katherine Hayles offers a compelling case for computational authorship.