2003
Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Human waste takes center stage in Dominique Laporte's unusual microhistory, a book as valuable for the anecdotes as for its argument.
According to Amy Elias, Paul Maltby's negation of the mystical Other forecloses 'the most interesting conversation': between a critic who does not believe in visionary moments and those writers and critics who do believe in them.
On Amy Elias's view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott's early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.
2002
Against the notion that music is the most abstract of art forms, Olivia Block thinks of music as a language with its own vocabulary of sounds, patterns, rhythms, notes. On the day of a performance in Kyoto, Japan, these reflections alter Block's sense of her own language, English, deconstructed by Japanese advertisements, tee-shirts, "American" candy-bar wrappers, and text-cell phones.
A generous selection, with commentary and biographical background, for those coming newly to Matthias's work.
Rita Raley on the varieties of code/text, as discovered in the object-oriented aesthetic of Mez, Ted Warnell, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, and others.
Recent fiction by Curtis White, Alex Shakar, Michael Martone, and others read through the lens of Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein.
graphics: Artists Rights Society; Performance for MIDI keyboard, pianola configurations, and click-track:G. Schirmer Rental; studio portrait of Hedy Lamarr: Roy George and Associates.
Lance Olsen tells the story of a creative writing professor who walked.
Lev Manovich makes the first sustained case for a new media theory, but with cinema as his starting point he has a hard time engaging the non-representational artforms and aural explorations to be found there. So argues the Australian media writer, geniwate.
In the era of English Department Cultural Studies, does the study of literature belong to the poet-professors? Marjorie Perloff offers a view from the English Department of what CW can do.
David Radavich rethinks creative writing as an art of living - one of many.
Sukenick responds to Fleisher's feminist critique of "Narralogues" in the voice of his own fictional jeune-fille, Jane.
Reflections on Creative Writing as potentially part of the tradition of the avant garde.
Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher suggest that creative writing pedagogy, particularly as found in the typical workshop, might benefit from a major, theoretically-informed, re-visioning. Introduced by ebr managing editor (1999-2002), Kirsten Young.
Sandy Huss suggests that the reform envisioned by Amato and Fleisher is already underway.
Brandon Barr considers Loss Glazier's attempt at a hypertext poetics that moves beyond the link.