critical ecology

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)

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)

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) 

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Nicole Shukin examines Karl Steel’s How to Make a Human (Steel reviews Shukin in the other half). In particular, Shukin discusses Steel’s framing of “the human” in terms of medieval violence, and she considers what that framing can offer to today’s political and ethical conversations.

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