Loizeaux and Fraistat (both teach English at the U. of Maryland) have edited a group of 14 papers that address contemporary approaches to the text. Among the issues and theories discussed are textual theory, postcolonialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, electronic use of text in art, and textualist art. The contributors teach poetry, English, comparative literature, French, art, Victorian media and culture, and communication design in the US, the UK, and France. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

What happens when, in the wake of postmodernism, the old enterprise of bibliography, textual criticism, or scholarly editing crosses paths and processes with visual and cultural studies? In Reimagining Textuality, major scholars map out in this volume a new discipline, drawing on and redirecting a host of subfields concerned with the production, distribution, reproduction, consumption, reception, archiving, editing, and sociology of texts.

From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.

The newest volume in the distinguished annual

Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge. Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.

Volume 15 continues to offer international perspectives on textual scholarship, including contributions by Adrian Armstrong, Ronald Broude, Danielle Clarke, A.S.G. Edwards, Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones, David Leon Higdon, Chris Jones, John Jowett, Barbara Oberg, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Manuel Portela, Damian Judge Rollison, Helen Smith, Dirk van Hulle, Andrew van der Vlies, and H.T.M. van Vliet, on topics ranging from the textuality of Thomas Jefferson to the gendering of the Early Modern British book trades. Items under review include The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 1, edited by Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Huggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turnville-Petre; Material Modernism, by George Bornstein; Textual Transgressions and Theories of the Text, by David Greetham; Electronic Texts in the Humanities, by Susan Hockey; Problems of Editing, edited by Christa Jansohn; From Author to Text, edited by Caroline Levine and Mark W. Turner; Text und Edition, edited by Rüdiger Nutt-Koforth, Bodo Plachta, H.T.M. van Vliet and Heermann Zwerschina; Thomas Hardy: A Textual Study of the Short Stories, by Martin Ray; The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2, edited by Thorlac Turnville-Petre and Hoyt Duggan; and editions of Georg Büchner, Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Spenser, and Oscar Wilde. W. Speed Hill is Professor of English, Lehman College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

This text is a companion to the critically acclaimed 'My Way', Charles Bernstein's 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems. It is a compilation of 69 poems, with its fractured nursery rhymes and distressed mottoes.

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems, his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art. Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner. From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

"The Torn Book: UnReading William Blake's Marginalia argues for the connection between British poet and painter William Blake's marginalia (the annotations he made in the volumes he owned and borrowed) and the role that often multivalent symbols like pens, writers, readers, and books play throughout his art." "The Torn Book pays particular attention to original Blake items, including the various annotated volumes housed at the Huntington Library, Houghton Library, Cambridge's University Library and Wren Library, Dr. Williams's Library, and the British Library, among others."--BOOK JACKET.

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all—part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.