essays

2007

30-Sep-2007
Saving the Past: Deleuze's Proust and Signs

Stephen Hawkins engages with the "web of counterintuitive, paradoxical, contentious and yet important claims" that he identifies in Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs.

23-Sep-2007
Reading the Conflicting Reviews: The Naysayers Gerald Graff overlooked in Clueless in Academe

Geneviève Brassard defends Gerald Graff's original approaches in Clueless in Academe against his critics - for the problem with Graff's book does not lie between the covers but rather between the ears of those who fault him excessively for sins of omission and commission.

21-Sep-2007
Plagiarism, Creativity, and the Communal Politics of Renewal

As Christian Moraru argues here that the new is still the objective in contemporary writing. But writers and artists make it by making it anew rather than new ("Get it used," Andrei Codrescu invites us), a new not so much novel as renovated, reframed and reproduced rather than produced, which by the same token redefines and advertises authorship as deliberate plagiarism.

13-Sep-2007
Dovetailing Details Fly Apart - All Over, Again, In Code, In Poetry, In Chreods (with an Introduction by Joseph Tabbi)

With an introduction by Joseph Tabbi, this collaborative essay by Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo carries the debate into the analysis of specific poems and poetic practices, both written and spoken, graphic and sonic, alphabetically and digitally coded.

01-Aug-2007
Seeking

Rob Swigart's "Seeking" is a clever and funny story whose roots lie in the materialization of internet interdating connections. Moving through the technological and media reductions of desire, Swigart parallels the overarching theme of "seeking" with a form that is itself punctuated with questions.

25-Jul-2007
On Being Difficult

Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism and self-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military 'World Target' that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework for knowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.

30-May-2007
Soliciting Taste: How sweet the taste of salted bream...

Teri Hoskin, as part of the collection of electropoetics essays on Gregory Ulmer, hypertextually approaches the question of writing and design, of writing as design.

10-May-2007
Illogic of Sense | The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix: Introduction

Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye introduce the collection of essays, appearing here in the electropoetics thread, from the Alt-x e-book The Illogic of Sense.

09-May-2007
From Mystorian to Curmudgeon: Skulking Toward Finitude

Marcel O'Gorman offers a candid account of what it means to introduce the computer apparatus into teaching in the humanities.

09-May-2007
On Hip-Hop, A Rhapsody

Michael Jarrett practices an Ulmer-inspired heuretics to write about rap.

09-May-2007
StudioLab UMBRELLA

Jon McKenzie, a former student of Gregory Ulmer's, traces the relations of influence and mentorship.

09-May-2007
SURFACE TO SURFACE, ASHES TO ASHES (REPORTING TO U)

Linda Marie Walker writes an involved meditation on the concept of the interface and its relation to place.

09-May-2007
The King and I: Elvis and the Post-Mortem or A Discontinuous Narrative in Several Media (On the Way to Hypertext)

Niall Lucy enacts a writing that weaves critical and theoretical speculation, rock journalism, hagiography and autobiography.

09-May-2007
The Two Ulmers in e-Media Studies: Vehicle and Driver

Craig Saper ingeniously interprets Gregory Ulmer as an object of study, as both a vehicle and driver of signification.

11-Apr-2007
NINES: a federated model for integrating digital scholarship

NINES is an initiative at the University of Virginia to "establish a coordinated network of peer-reviewed content and tools." We present the project here because it's consistent with the initiative at ebr to create a peer-to-peer literary network for conceptual writing.

09-Apr-2007
COLLEX: semantic collections & exhibits for the remixable web

Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia introduces the COLLEX tool, a "COLL-ection" and "EX-hibition" of online images and interlinked texts. Nowviskie's white paper is the first essay to be "wrapped" into the ebr interface. That is, the essay has itelf been collected, tagged, and interlinked with the essays in ebr. This way, the essay is not just about the development of a semantic network - it is part of one.

Revolution 2: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski

Kiki Benzon and Mark Z. Danielewski discuss his 2006 book Only Revolutions at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

03-Feb-2007
Recollection in Process

There has never been a 'Best of the electronic book review' or a print collection. After ten full years of online publication, ebr has devised other ways of marking time, using techniques available in the same electronic media where the work first appeared. Here the editor presents an initial 'Gathering' of ebr essays, pulled from each of the journal's threads to date.

2006

24-Dec-2006
23-Dec-2006
Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star. Lee Perry on the Mix

Erik Davis listens to Lee Perry's work.