From Another 5-minute Romp thru the IP, Cory Arcangel, 2011 by Davin Heckman In 2010, “Bradley Horwitz, Google vice president of product marketing, spoke of Buzz as ‘a Google approach to sharing’ and a tool that will ‘help you manage your attention better’” (Fuchs 290-91). Implicit in the Google view is the idea that our consciousness…
Read Moreby Brian Kim Stefans Introduction Creators of electronic literature are progressing toward a more pervasive employment of the “ludic” — of the spirit of play inhabiting not just the writing, and not just the programming, but both in an elaborate, symbiotic combination. The tradition of “ludic” writing is well-rehearsed in criticism of electronic literature, for…
Read Moreby Adam Staley Groves American political narratives failed this election.[1] It seems the political media was befuddled as sayers and intelligentsia failed to provide wise counsel (save Nate Silver’s 538). Yet the failure is not just ‘they’ it’s ‘we’ machine users, participating in this representation process and sharing in derision. How to read what was…
Read MoreText Rain, Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv, 1999 by Yra van Dijk Digital literature runs the risk of becoming top-heavy, by which I mean that the amount of theory (let’s say: the head) on digital literature is weightier than the body of works to be considered. This is quite contrary to the situation in print…
Read More‘David Copperfield and Uriah Heep’. From David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, 1850. Illustration by by Fred Barnard, 1870 by Simon Calder How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, Princeton University Press, 360 pp. What use is this book, which asks us to enlarge our ideas about the possible uses of…
Read MoreCard from A Shufflebook, by Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof, 1970 by Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort Introduction The paper formulates the category “shuffle literature” to help reveal important qualities of certain intriguing works of fiction and poetry. We show how unusual formal and material aspects of these literary works interact with one another,…
Read MorePhotograph by Aunt Owwee by Cameron Neylon With major governments signalling a shift to Open Access it seems like a good time to be asking which organisations in the scholarly communications space will survive the transition. It is likely that the major current publishers will survive, although relative market share and focus is likely to change.…
Read Moreby Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle Introduction In The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online, editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (2009) argues that the collaborative cultures emerging around web 2.0 platforms cultivate a “digital socialism”, with broad political and economic implications for the producers of online culture. Kelly, alongside others, sees the…
Read MoreEngraving of Cimetiére des Saints-Innocents in Paris, c.1550 by Peter Johnson In Foucault’s lecture to architects, the cemetery is the most prevalent and thoroughly discussed example of heterotopia and yet it has been virtually ignored in most interpretations of the concept. He mentions the cemetery explicitly in relation to two of his ‘principles’. Firstly, he…
Read MoreCharles Duhigg, New York Times reporter and author of The Power of Habit by Steve Silberman For a species obsessed with free will, choices, and options, we spend a surprising amount of time acting like zombies. We’re already sipping our morning coffee before we notice we’ve navigated to the kitchen on automatic pilot. We pull…
Read MoreFrom cover of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie, 1920 by Deborah Blum There is altogether too much strychnine about this case – The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie, 1920. In the midst of World War I – or so the story goes – a young Englishwoman received a literary challenge from her…
Read MoreFrom Caged Heat, New World Pictures, 1974 by Kathleen Cairns Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars, and Artists, Jodie Michelle Lawston, Ashley E. Lucas, eds., Albany: State University of New York Press, 352 pp. Once the cell doors slam behind them, virtually all prisoners exist in a netherworld–invisible to people outside, while inside they are…
Read MoreSergey Sazonov (1860 – 1927), Minister of Foreign Affairs of Imperial Russia from 1910 to 1916 by Lucien J. Frary The Russian Origins of the First World War, by Sean McMeekin, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 344 pp. The centennial anniversary of the First World War provides a fitting opportunity to review the…
Read MorePluies by Toby Harper Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand, by Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, London: I.B. Tauris, 256 pp. Visitors and residents alike tend to think of New Zealand as a clean, green land, rivaling Ireland in the luxuriance of its verdure and leading the world in the naturalness of…
Read MoreVoting day in a small town. Photograph by Liz West by Jason Brennan I. Good Intentions Aren’t Enough Betty Benevolence wants to save the world. Yet she has crazy ideas about how to do it. When she sees a starving child, she steals his remaining food. When she sees someone in pain, she kicks him…
Read Moreby Noah Arceneaux Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age, by Greg Goodale, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 208 pp. Given the subject matter of this work, it seems only appropriate to begin with a musical metaphor. Sonic Persuasions is like one of those rock ‘n’ roll albums from the early 1960s, released before…
Read MoreThe Spice Girls by Rahila Gupta Feminism needs to recapture the state from the neo-liberal project to which it is in hock in order to make it deliver for women. It must guard against atomisation and recover its transformative aspirations to shape the new social order that is hovering on the horizon. How should feminists…
Read MoreTom and Eva, tailpiece illustration by Hammat Billings for Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Bryan Rindfleisch Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, The Splendid Edition, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Edited by David S. Reynolds. Ilustrated by Hammatt Billings, New York: Oxford University Press, 608 pp. Abraham Lincoln famously greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe at the…
Read More‘Terse As Virulent Hermaphrodites’: Middlebrow Representations of Modernist Poets in the 1920s by George Simmers Based on a paper given at the conference on ‘The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism’, at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, 15 September, 2011. In P.G. Wodehouse’s 1925 story, ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’, the heroine is…
Read MoreEngraving of the U.S. Treasury building in 1804, from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, No. 262, March, 1872 by Alison K. Hoagland Fortress of Finance: The United States Treasury Building, by Pamela Scott, Washington DC: Treasury Historical Association, Illustrations. xiv + 318 pp Pamela Scott, the premier architectural historian of Washington’s monumental buildings, has produced a…
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