essays

2001

15-Feb-2001
What Cybertext Theory Can't Do

A reluctant response to Markku Eskelinen's "Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying," where Hayles discusses her admiration for Espen Aarseth's work... and the limitations within it she has perceived.

01-Feb-2001
Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying

Considering hypertext as a subset of cybertexts, Markku Eskelinen offers seven examples of how to implement Espen Aarseth's seven-fold typology.

10-Jan-2001
Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide

In response to Nick Montfort's review of Cybertext, N. Katherine Hayles coins an alternative term, cyber|literature.

10-Jan-2001
Of Tea Cozy and Link

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink performs an autopsy on the hypertextual corpse.

01-Jan-2001
After the Post

For Daniel Punday, Bernard Siegert's historical materialism - a difficult synthesis of historical, literary, and institutional analysis - falls somewhere between Derrida and Foucault. But see also the review in ebr by historian Richard John, who considers Siegert in the line of Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Harold Innis.

01-Jan-2001
Dali Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia

Stephanie Strickland investigates an epistemological shift in web-specific art and literature, from an understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance.

01-Jan-2001
Feeding the Global Spider

Linda Brigham sees Zygmunt Bauman's Globalization: The Human Consequences as a provocative introduction to our current environmental and economic predicament.

01-Jan-2001
New = Old, Old = New

Jan Baetens argues that Chris Ware's print-based comic book, Jimmy Corrigan, has already produced the revolution longed for by Scott McCloud - a revolution, however, that will not be digitized.

01-Jan-2001
Unfolding Laramée

Allison Hunter shows how an artist can be fully contemporary without digitizing, streaming, or projecting imagery. Presenting jacquard looms and punch card technologies from the 1950s, difference engines and magnetic core memory stacks, silicon chips in wood housing and digital code on 18th-century woven fabric, Eve Laramee manipulates history like a medium.

01-Jan-2001
Webarts

In spite of the millennial call for an end to issues in Winter y2k, ebr11 - a new issue - went online at the turn of the year 2000/2001. There would be yet another issue a year later ("Music/Sound/Noise") before the transition to the new interface could be completed.

2000

False Pretenses, Parasites, and Monsters

Tom LeClair surveys six gargantuan texts—both hyper- and print—and finds that size is not all that matters.

30-Dec-2000
German TV Troubles

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young takes the outside perspective on German media studies.

30-Dec-2000
Lexia to Perplexia:

hypertext? cybertext? hypermedia? webart? while new media critics debate the terms, Talan Memmott has produced the thing itself, a creative use of applied technology.

30-Dec-2000
The Runoff: A Simple Electoral Reform

Every crank has an idea. Every American is a crank. Philip Wohlstetter is an American, therefore - well, you get the idea.

Not Browsing but Reading: Magazines and Books Online

Perusing websites pertaining to literary matters, Eye magazine cites HTML's "gaptoothed rawness" as a hindance to readability in ebr (prior to the journal's redesign).

Constrained Thinking: From Network to Membrane

Paul Harris examines the theoretical aspects of constrained thinking in the age of electronic textuality (in 2000 words, natch!)

Mister Smathers

a short fiction by Harry Mathews

Nothing Less and Nothing More: The Oulipo Compendium

Alain Vuillemin comprehends the compendium - a summing up of four decades of Oulipian activity. A review of Harry Mathews & Alastaire Brotchie's Oulipo Compendium (1998, London: Atlas Press). Translation by James Stevens.

The Education of Adams (Henry) / ALAMO

Paul Braffort studies constrained writing from Henry Adams to Braffort's own ALAMO project, and presents his findings in the form of a Triolet (between 1999 and 2000 words)

Toward a General Theory of the Constraint

Bernardo Schiavetta: a definition (in 2000 words)