Book review for Contemporary Women's Writing of Bodies of Information, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont. Reader-oriented review for people outside DH
Review
In this project review, I discuss the companion website criticalcodestudies.com in relation to Mark C. Marino’s book Critical Code Studies (2020). Over the past decades, companion websites have become a small but persistently growing genre in academia, with products ranging from paratextual records to publications in their own right. The Critical Code Studies companion website makes excellent use of content and design to make media-specific arguments that interrogate the research subject, foregrounding a method that oscillates between close reading and contextual reading as well as promotes personal and communal reading practices. The combination of book and companion website successfully makes intellectual interventions into the case studies but also into our conception of source code in general. I review how the companion website reflects, amplifies, and contradicts the arguments made in the book.
(Author abstract)
In 1994, Australian artist and poet Mez Breeze began to develop an online language she named Mezangelle. Using programming language and informal speech, Mezangelle rearranges and dissects standard English to create new and unexpected meaning. Mez Breeze's overall approach to codework—online experimental writing that explores the relationship between machine and human languages—is imbued with a sense of playfulness and creativity. Her Mezangelle poetry has appeared throughout the internet for the last two decades under multiple names and connected to different avatars.
(Source: Author)
Steffen Hantke presents an archeology of Don DeLillo’s Underworld.
(Source: ebr)
Ted Pelton views Robert Creeley’s image/text collaborations in Buffalo, NY.
(Source: ebr)
In this review, Manuel Portela considers Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes in light of a “general computerization of the modes of production of writing.”