Series

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

Conceived as an ongoing conversation, rolling out 2-3 articles each month until the end of the year, all contributions are tackling at least one of the four following areas: Building Research Infrastructures and Environments, Exploring Creative Research Practice, Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies, and Applying Digital Pedagogy.

(Source: editors)

Using Electricity is a series of computer generated books, meant to reward reading in conventional and unconventional ways. The series title takes a line from the computer generated poem “A House of Dust,” developed by Alison Knowles with James Tenney in 1967. This work, a FORTRAN computer program and a significant early generator of poetic text, combines different lines to produce descriptions of houses. The series is edited by Nick Montfort.

Slavoj Žižek addresses the situation of post-9/11 global politics - and his own, controversial, theories of the political - in this interview with Eric Dean Rasmussen.

(ebr)

A Review of Malise Ruthven’s A Fury for God: The IslamistAttack on America, from Tim Keane.

(ebr)

R.M. Berry on the recuperation of politicized language, in (and through) the fiction of Marianne Hauser and Lidia Yuknavitch.

(ebr)

Recorded by Joseph Tabbi. A week in the life of the artist. 

(ebr)

This new thread presents in short order what scholars today in the field ofliterature, science, and the arts are reading and viewing.

Everything that happens, happens now. The essays, narratives, and essay-narratives gathered under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the 'presentist' bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly: our non-periodical, continuous publication is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions.

(Source: ebr, thread editors' statement)

Technocapitalism began as a set of essays collected in 2002 to be the first in a series of Alt-X Critical E-books.

Under the "technocapitalism" thread, ebr authors regard technology as neither utopian nor neutral, but as capital. As everyday life becomes further defined by communications, automations, and informatics, technology shapes our languages, animates our environments, and fosters our relationships. Techno-logic assures us that it applies scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life, bringing planning, design, and growth. Yet, this is a conservative philosophy that serves to reign in technologies. The essays gathered in this thread (circa 2003) by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills fleshed out some of the social relations of exploitation created by this harnessing of information technologies, especially in the university and through the web. A decade later, the essays assembled by Aron Pease explore our current era of technocapitalism more broadly. As the techno club prepares its citizens for permanent war in the global state, we can also observe a technocapitalist imaginary, exemplified in the wildest fantasies of postmodern fiction and transdisciplinary discourse, pointing a way through.

(Source: EBR)