CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

David Banash, From Advertising to the Avant-Garde: 
Rethinking the Invention of Collage

Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp, Reading Game/Text: 
EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital Communities

Brian Reed, "Eden or Ebb of the Sea": Susan Howe's 
Word Squares and Postlinear Poetics



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                      Hypertext Essay


George Dillon, Montage/Critique: Another Way of 
Writing Social History


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                      Review Essay 

Arkady Plotnitsky, Evolution and Contingency. A 
review of Stephen J. Gould, _The Structure of 
Evolutionary Theory_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
UP, 2002.


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                      Reviews 

Jeffrey T. Nealon, Pain-in-the-ass Democracy. A 
review of John McGowan, _Democracy's Children: 
Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics_. 
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002.

Stuart J. Murray, Not Just a Matter of the 
Internet. A review of Mark Poster, _What's the 
Matter with the Internet?_ Electronic Mediations, 
Vol. 3. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.

Hillary L. Chute, Irigaray's Erotic Ontology. A
review of Luce Irigaray, _Between East and West: 
From Singularity to Community_. New York: 
Columbia UP, 2002. 

Daniel Worden, Killing the Big Other. A review of 
Slavoj Zizek, _The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse 
Core of Christianity_. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.

Charles Sheaffer, Exposition in Ruins. A review of 
Gregory Ulmer, _Internet Invention_. New York: 
Pearson, 2003. 

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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

David Banash, From Advertising to the Avant-Garde: 
Rethinking the Invention of Collage

    o Abstract: This essay offers an alternative 
analysis of the invention of collage, arguing that 
this technique, most typically viewed as avant-garde 
and oppositional, is in fact preceded by and rooted 
in practices pioneered by early mass media 
advertisers. Beginning with an examination of the 
orthodox versions of the invention of collage told by 
art historians, the essay notes how these accounts 
exclude the role of popular and commercial culture. It 
then develops a detailed analysis of advertising 
techniques preceding and informing fine art's invention 
of collage, suggesting that techniques of critique were 
first made available through commercial sources. Turning 
to the work of William S. Burroughs, the essay considers 
his analysis of mass media as both a source of pernicious 
social control and a force for critique and social 
transformation. The essay concludes that the role of 
collage in both advertising and critical art must be 
rethought through a dialectic which accounts for 
collage's origins in the needs of advertising and its 
promise as a technique for radical critique.--db


George Dillon, Montage/Critique: Another Way of 
Writing Social History
    
    o Abstract: In the course of the last 100 years, 
scholars have repeatedly envisioned a new form of social 
and cultural critique: one in which the visual would play 
a much larger role and in which juxtaposition and montage 
would replace linear and continuous development. We now 
see Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as articulating
issues that concerned John Berger and Jean Mohr in the 
1960s and 1970s and that now take on new urgency in relation 
to digital imagery and e-text: these increase the 
possibilities of montage and juxtaposition by hypertext 
links, as can be seen in the online works of Giles Peaker, 
Geoff Broadway, Robin Michal, and Russet Lederman. But 
images and montage do not necessarily produce critique, and 
Benjamin's "method of juxtaposition" is not quite so 
portable as Michal suggests. What is lacking with Michal 
are the multiple perspectives from and on history that we 
find in works by Broadway and Esther Parada. --gld 


Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp, Reading Game/Text: 
EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital Communities 

    o Abstract: The essay begins with a review of a recent 
court case ruling that video games do not constitute 
"speech" in order to develop arguments about the 
relationship between "media" (which communicate) and 
"activities" (in which, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen 
Limbaugh argues, any communication is "purely 
inconsequential"). Focusing on the online role-playing game 
EverQuest, the essay contends that the combination of 
game-like structures in EverQuest with certain kinds of 
expressions (spoken by "virtual" bodies) means that the 
form cannot be read exclusively either as literature or 
as a game. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined 
Communities, the essay attempts to discern those structural 
elements in EverQuest that might be understood as shaping 
or creating large-scale forms of experience (much as the 
novel, as Anderson argues, gave its readers a new experience 
of simultaneous time that allowed them to identify in 
national terms with people they could never hope to know 
or meet). The essay intends this broadly structural 
hermeneutic to illustrate the manner in which those things 
that make EverQuest a game establish the terms by which it 
participates in culture. Its reading of the game's structure 
(which is expressed, finally, in the code that makes the 
software) is designed to map out the expression of that 
software's intelligence as it interacts with the individual 
people who play the game (and who do so, almost always, on 
the game's terms). The essay ultimately argues that 
EverQuest is an important site for the articulation and 
experience of cultural and political value, of broader 
understandings of communities and what they mean, and of 
the question of "literature" (or, more broadly, "expression") 
in digital contexts. --eh, ew 


Brian Reed, "Eden or Ebb of the Sea": Susan Howe's Word 
Squares and Postlinear Poetics

   o Abstract: Instead of lines or stanzas, contemporary 
innovative poetry frequently relies on unfamiliar, often 
highly visual organizing principles. This essay argues that 
today's "postlinear" poetries represent less a coherent 
movement or style, though, than a diverse set of inquiries 
into the interface between visual and verbal means of 
communication. To demonstrate the difficulties of 
generalizing about this heterogeneous phenomenon, this 
essay concentrates on accounting for the origins and 
function of one device, the word square, in the poetry of 
Susan Howe. Such a task requires that one examine Howe's 
early career as an installation artist, her admiration of 
the painter of Agnes Martin, her apprenticeship to the 
concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the abiding thematic 
role of the open ocean in her writing. The essay concludes 
with a brief comparison of Howe's word squares to those 
employed by another writer, Myung Mi Kim, to illustrate 
the need for further, case-by-case analysis before critics 
can claim any reliable mapping of this new phase in the 
history of English-language verse. --br