In this review of Heather Houser’s Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Sharalyn Sanders identifies the hopeful potential for environmental justice via contemporary literature. Finding a solidarity implied between intersectional identities and ecocriticism, Sander’s finds in Houser’s call for “scholarly activism” an antidote to the detachment which threatens to thwart environmental awareness.

In reviewing James McFarland’s Constellation, Donald Cross reminds readers of the rich potential of scholarly discourse. Beyond mere citations and their absence, Cross traces across the bright stars of Nietzsche and Benjamin (and Derrida) relationships worthy of serious consideration. In an age of copy/paste citations, impact reports, and optimized academics, pondering the constellations offers an opportunity to rediscover the subtle intensity of tracing forms in the void.

A serious (and playful) consideration of the power of “things,” Christopher Leise reviews Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things through the lens of the Lego Movie. The implied dynamism of the manipulable modularity of the Lego world provides strong resonances with Bennett’s take on “thing-power” and distributed agency, while the crisis in the plot of the Lego Movie offers an apt illustration of the dangers of human exceptionalism discussed in Bennett’s text.

Joyce’s treatment of baseball in Going the Distance isn’t merely thematic, according to Punday, who believes that baseball (and its emphasis on numerical ordering) here represents the balance of the poetic and computational that defines Joyce’s electronic literature.

Ciccoricco acknowledges that Michael Joyce's new novel (Foucault, in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden), which gives a fictionalized account of Foucualt's relationship to Jean Barraque, opens Joyce up to a broader range of criticisms, though Ciccoricco also argues that by focusing on a "productive and troubled time for Foucault," Joyce ultimately offers a "compelling meditation on what we might call the nexus of madness, philosophy, and literature."

In this essay, Laura Shackelford reviews Jeffrey T. Nealon’s “Post-Postmodernism.” Not merely an historical supplement to Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism,” but an attempt to devise a new critical method appropriate to our “just-in-time” present, Shacklford discusses its implications for literary practice in the 21st Century.

In this essay John Cayley reviews Nick Montfort’s #!, a book of computer generated poetry and the code that generated it. Exploring the triangle of Montfort’s programs, the machines that read them, and the output presented for human readers, Cayley situates the experience of reading and writing as intrinsically virtual, powered by its sustained potentiality, rather than its definitive comprehension.

In his review of Stefan Herbrechter’s Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, John Bruni addresses the technoscientific and philosophical varieties of posthumanism, and considers the necessity of moving beyond the “dehumanizing” effects of technocentric theories of cultural evolution. This critical project seeks to preserve freedom and agency, rejecting a concept of posthumanism as a side-effect of innovation in favor of one that sees change itself arising from social processes.

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Karl Steel examines Nicole Shukin's Animal Capital (Shukin reviews Steel in the other half). In particular, Steel looks at Shukin's biopolitical framework, and considers how that framework challenges not only our conception of what constitutes the animal, but also--and more to the bone--our conception of the capacity of fields like animal studies.

In one half of a pair of critical reviews looking at recent titles in animal studies, Nicole Shukin examines Karl Steel's How to Make a Human (Steel reviews Shukin in the other half). In particular, Shukin discusses Steel's framing of "the human" in terms of medieval violence, and she considers what that framing can offer to today's political and ethical conversations.

Maria Engberg reviews two books that describe the dialectical relationship between literary production, digital media, and literary reception from opposite ends of the historical and aesthetic spectrum. "Literary paleontologist" C.T. Funkhouser examines the born-digital poetry of the 1950s (and earlier), while Johanna Drucker writes an eye-witness account of the contemporary encounter between print literature, humanities research, and "speculative computing."

According to Fabienne Collignon, Timothy Melley’s refusal to submit “clear vectors of resistance” to "so-called democratic states" in The Covert Sphere is far from a shortcoming of the work, and instead marks its distinct quality. The absence of clear political solution, Collignon contends, informs The Covert Sphere’s achievement as a call for a change of mind in a population who, wittingly or not, have "participated in, and continue to collaborate with, a system of pretended innocence and victimization."

Maria Damon reviews Alan Sondheim's Writing Under: Selections from the Internet Text in light of the literature of John Fahey to demonstrate that those texts, like her performative review of them, enact a "mastering/dismantling itch twitch" that has a "life of its own, moving through the artist in a parasitic way."

Andrew Reynolds reviews Stephen Schryer’s Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction, which argues for an instrumental form of intellectual labor in the service of broader social goals. Comparing novelists and sociologists representative of this new class, Schryer detects a self-defeating strategy in their rejection of collective instrumentalism in favor of individual dissemination of cultural education. Where Schryer closes by criticizing recent conceptions of an alternative economy of non-instrumental intellectual work within the university as a fantasy, Reynolds observes a “performative contradiction” at work in Schryer’s text and suggests that it is a good thing.

The good news in Alex Link's review is that Karin Hoepker's No Maps for These Territories begins the necessary work on spatiality in William Gibson's first two trilogies. Still, much remains to be done. Link points the way to a critically productive analysis built on Hoepker's opening moves.

No need to get excited. According to Julie Reiser, The Affect Theory Reader offers the reader no end of theory but little affect. Reiser suggests this points to a broader and systemic problem in any reading or theory of affect.

Dennis Cooper's disorienting novel, The Sluts, complicates reader expectations about subjectivity and identity. As a result, Megan Milks notes that it "is either the most honest or the most dishonest literature I have come across."

Literature joins the living dead. A critic illuminates Brian Lennon's "scene" of literature today: both suspended and emergent in the world system.

From early modern texts to "publishing events," Madeleine Monson-Rosen's review follows Matt Cohen's exploration of the "networked wilderness." It turns out that the English colonists and native Americans were already information theorists, centuries before cybernetics emerged at MIT.

Richard Kalich's latest protagonist is Richard Kalich, but one critic views this postmodern occupation of the novel as an opportunity - even an encouragement - to forget about him.