essays

2004

24-Aug-2004
History as Accretion and Excavation

Paul Gleason on Joseph McElroy's mid-career epic, Women and Men, as contrasted with Don DeLillo's Underworld.

23-Aug-2004
McElroy's "Letter"

Charles Molesworth on style and spatial form in McElroy's Letter Left to Me, a novel whose poetic making is also an ethical growth.

22-Aug-2004
Being Inside the Sentence

Gregg Biglieri reads "into" Actress in the House and revels in Joseph McElroy's syntax.

20-Aug-2004
Re-opening Hind's Kidnap

Joseph Milazzo writes about one of the least written about books by Joseph McElroy.

19-Aug-2004
God Help Us

A Review of Malise Ruthven's A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, from Tim Keane, with links to a growing body of writing on terror in ebr.

19-Aug-2004
Weight Inward into Lightness: A Reading of Canoe Repair

"The plot offers not so much progress as recurrence, duplication, and reiteration." Flore Chevaillier offers one way to fill in the gaps of Joseph McElroy "Canoe Repair."

18-Aug-2004
Joseph McElroy's Cyborg Plus

Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.

17-Aug-2004
Vectoral Muscle in a Great Field of Process

Yves Abrioux approaches Woman and Men (1987) as an extended novelistic medition on cognition and action.

10-Aug-2004
Adrian Miles responds to Hypertexts and Interactives

Adrian Miles on themes of print vs. digital, engagement vs. immersion, easy vs. difficult, and affect vs. effect, as they appear in section five of First Person.

05-Aug-2004
Front to the Future: Joseph McElroy's Ancient History

Ian Demsky on Joseph McElroy's Ancient History and welcome interruptions.

11-Jul-2004
Game Theories

It's "Game Time." Here in section four we see what the dynamics of time and space have to do with the games people play.

The Female Narrator

Judy Malloy on the voice of female narrators.

27-Jun-2004
Critical Simulation

Theories of performance, training, and psychology explain simulation - or do they? - in the third section of First Person.

27-Jun-2004
Ian Bogost's response to Critical Simulation

Ian Bogost, the co-designer of The Howard Dean for Iowa Game (along with First Person contributor Gonzalo Frasca), deconstructs section three.

27-Jun-2004
Penny responds in turn

Simon Penny re-collects the dimensions of simulation-as-training in martial arts, football, and ballet (not to mention computer games).

Verse in Reverse

On the occasion of the 2003 Fitzpatrick O'Dinn Award publication, Alan Sondheim asks some questions of formally constrained literature. The more strict the constraints, the more open, free, and plentiful the questions.

26-Jun-2004
Jan Van Looy responds to Penny

An Internet response to Simon Penny that separates the transfer of gaming skills from ethics.

24-Jun-2004
Academic Intent

Mark Barret cautions against reinventing the wheel in this riposte to Cyberdrama and to Janet Murray's essay.

24-Jun-2004
Julian Raul Kucklich responds

Julian Raul Kucklich points out the virtues of interdisciplinarity cooperation for ludologists.

&Now Conference Review

Late Breaking: William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Rob Wittig post from Notre Dame University on the &Now festival of writers and writing.