1500 characters max. how many hours revising?

Reading & writing are migrating to digitally networked environments; literature & literary studies must not be left behind. How are scholars & writers creating a sustainable literary presence within noisy, image-dominated media ecologies? My 3-part project analyzes & participates in the literary field’s evolution within an emerging, collaborative, network culture.

Editorial: ebr (www.ElectronicBookReview.com), a literary journal & networked database, hosts critical exchanges between distributed scholarly & artistic communities interested in digital writing & publishing, interface design, & cultural critique. I coordinate clusters, assign essays, & edit peer-to-peer-reviewed articles. Goals: keep conversations current, moderate debates, & solicit innovative scholarship.

Archival: Contribute to Archive-It, a curatorial experiment designed to preserve & disseminate the 1st generation of e-lit. On the Electronic Literature Organization’s international research team, I select works, write evaluations, & develop an e-lit lexicon. Over time, these efforts will provide a profile of the emergent e-lit field & scholarly tools for studying it.

Critical: Applying my editorial & archival expertise, I examine how changing communication systems affect world-literary formations (literary networks & innovative fictions) in the network society. Connect affective & ideological redistributions of the sensible to sense-making techniques in digital and printed networked narratives.

Seeking Satiric Sublimation

Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America? Personally, I'd have to vote for Bill Moyers or Studs Terkel, because they're better listeners during interviews. But then, of course, there's Stephen Colbert, who liberates the truth so it may soar like an American eagle!

As an avid reader addicted to dozens of online journals and newspapers, despite being disgusted by the onslaught of lies, propaganda and stupidity reported (and too often uncritically repeated) there, I think I'd fit in perfectly at the "Daily Show."

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

Could I get away with running a media studies course based on this model? Finding a humanities department that could afford 15 TiVos would be hard, but still...

Original Intent

Patriarchy and Pathology

Last night at dinner I asked Ira how one might productively analyze the Joseph Fritzl case in terms of systemic, rather than subjective, violence. (Yes, we do have dinner conversations like this. Whaddya expect? We're both PhDs in literature.) Ira's response: begin by looking at the way the Austrian State's patriarchal biases effectively enabled Fritzl to commit his crimes. The State, for instance, repeatedly ignored his daughter's attempts to run away from home, even though her father had a record as a sex offender. Ira's hypothesis is corroborated by "Joseph Fritzl's fictive forebears," a TLS essay, the gist of which is this: Symptomological analyses of Austrian literature, including Freud's case studies, suggest a systemic sociocultural tendency to indulge abusive patriarchs while disregarding patriarchy's victims, primarily women and children.

Will the minnestoa review Survive?

Marc Bosquet reports on his blog and at The Chronicle of Higher Education that the minnesota review's days may be numbered due to budget cuts that"quality managers" at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy want to impose on the journal.

It would be a shame if the minnesota review closed shop. (Full disclosure: The mr has published my work.) Could Williams move to another university and take the minnesota review with him? Many public U's are hurting financially right now, it's true, but surely there's a shrewd dean somewhere who can recognize that hiring Williams and funding the mr would be a great opportunity to increase their English department's profile - for a reasonable price.

It's great that Jameson, Felski, Berube, Menand, etc. went to bat for the mr, but maybe it's time to call in Stanley Fish. As a specialist in contract law and the former head of Duke UP, I would think that Stan the Man could - and probably would - negotiate a sweet deal for the mr and Jeffrey Williams. In fact, if Fish was still the Dean of LAS at UIC, I'd ask him myself if it would be possible to bring the mr to UIC's English Department. It already hosts two fine critical journals, ebr and Mediations. Why not one more?

Part of the problem is that editorial work is not properly valued in academia. Editorial work is absolutely necessary for the publish-or-perish model to survive, but the time-intensive labor (too much of which is effectively outsourced) required to put out a quality publication is invisible, and editing is treated more like service than research, which is a serious mistake. Faculty and grad students need to make it clear that the editorial infrastructure needs to be maintained in order for the system to function.