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Chaos and Control

Anderson’s author statement introduces a Scalar project titled "Chaos and Control: The Critique of Computation in American Commercial Media (1950-1980)," which examines the critiques of computing culture posed by TV and movies during the mainframe computer age by looking closely at the substance of these critiques rather than reducing them to reflections of developments in the socioeconomic world. "Chaos and Control" is available on the Scalar platform at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370221.

Holocaust Survivors on Schindler's List

Shandler’s author statement introduces a Scalar project titled "Holocaust Survivors on Schindler’s List; or, Reading a Digital Archive against the Grain." Examining references to the 1993 film Schindler’s List in videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors at the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the project’s "against-the-grain" reading demonstrates how mediation inheres in the processes of creating, archiving, and accessing these works of remembrance and, moreover, of remembering itself. "Holocaust Survivors on Schindler’s List" is available on the Scalar platform at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370212.

Index to Volume 85 (March 2013-December 2013)

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature / Neodomestic American Fiction

How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse / Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry / The Poetry of the Possible: Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude / Everyday Reading: Poetry a

Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination / Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature / Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphor

Cesar Chavez's Video Collection

Marez’s author statement introduces a Scalar project titled "Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection," which finds in Chavez’s store of graphics, photos, films, and videos from the 1940s to the 1990s evidence of farm workers’ appropriation of visual technologies to project social alternatives to the patriarchal white capitalism of agribusiness corporations. "Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection" is available on the Scalar platform at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370203.

Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Historical Processing, and the Videogame Sensorium

In recent years, the growing field of game studies has contributed to the ongoing cultural debate about what it means for videogames to be an art form that both selectively draws and dramatically departs from earlier forms such as the novel, theater, and cinema. To achieve a sense of videogames as a unique art form requires a more intimate understanding of the new sensorium that they open up—that is, the specific experience of spatiality, temporality, speed, graphics, audio, and procedural activity that they make available. To explore that sensorium, this essay analyzes Jonathan Blow’s independently produced hit American videogame Braid (2008). For all of the ways that Braid stands apart from contemporary videogames, it does so less to dismiss them than to contemplate, historicize, and produce a reading of the videogame form. Moreover, this game uses media-specific techniques to make accessible the material effects of the American military-industrial-media-entertainment network on historical consciousness. Braid adopts the affordances of game form to develop a formally experimental analytic of processing—one that is aesthetic, affective, and interactively experiential as opposed to purely cognitive. The game uses its formal blends and its play mechanics to complicate how history is typically thought and to imagine how it might be engaged or processed differently. Ultimately, Braid interrogates the impulses that drive videogames and the historical subjects that they produce.

Making the Perfect Record

Sayers’s author statement introduces a Scalar project titled "Making the Perfect Record." This project unpacks the often ignored, pre-1940s history of magnetic recording, with particular attention to how—through an interweaving of print fiction, sound transduction, storage media, audio playback, and visual culture—early magnetic recording materialized. In so doing, the essay offers scholars of both new and old media a sense of how we might better historicize the ostensible permanence and immateriality of contemporary data cultures and their digital economies. "Making the Perfect Record" is available on the Scalar platform at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2370230.

Toward a Postdigital Humanities: Cultural Analytics and the Computational Turn to Data-Driven Scholarship

What forms will literary and cultural criticism take in the twenty-first century, given the move toward open access, open data, and open government that is currently being promoted in the name of greater efficiency and transparency? Will the growing use of digital tools and data-led methodologies adopted from computer science to help us analyze the vast, networked nature of knowledge and information in postindustrial society produce a major change in our understanding of literature and culture, and indeed the humanities? Some have suggested that we have already embarked on a post-theoretical era, exemplified by a shift away from a concern with ideology and critique and toward more positivistic, quantitative, and empirical modes of analysis. If this is the case, should we be looking to develop new forms of literary and cultural criticism, characterized by an ability to combine the methodological and the theoretical, the quantitative and the qualitative, the digital and the traditional humanities? Are such new forms of literary and cultural criticism even possible?

Brief Mention

Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century / Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics

Literary Information Warfare: Eileen Chang, the US State Department, and Cold War Media Aesthetics

So’s essay reconstructs a literary genealogy for the emergence of "information warfare" in the early Cold War period (the 1950s). Specifically, it argues that this form of warfare—which So dubs "literary information warfare"—took shape first and most keenly within the US state’s encounter with Communist China. The essay narrates this story by exploring the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) recruitment of a major Chinese author, Eileen Chang, to the cause of information fabrication and deployment in Hong Kong. It combines this story with a brief history of 1950s US communications studies in which Chang’s work and new theories of information converge through the figure of Wilbur Schramm. Schramm, cofounder of the Iowa Writers Workshop and "father" of modern communications studies, worked with Chang via the USIA. In sum, Chang’s story sheds light on how the US state’s confrontation with Communist China in the 1950s provided the basis and impetus for developing a new model of information theory through the weaponizing of literature.

Preface: New Media and American Literature

Within, Aside, and Too Much: On Parentheticality across Media

In the context of the proliferation of textuality in the new media age, and the changing demands of adequately analyzing it, Scheible’s essay explores the possibilities of a reading strategy that asks how we might take parentheses as starting points for critical thinking, looking across three primary media sites: Jacques Derrida’s writing, criticism of the televisual laugh track, and Miranda July’s 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. Proposing we consider not only parentheses as textual marks but also "parentheticality" as a relational structure, Scheible’s essay weaves in and out of disciplinary boundaries and questions about the legacies of critical theory, comedy, sound, sexuality, independent filmmaking, and new media aesthetics.