First Person, Games, and the Place of Electronic Literature

After a hiatus for redesign, the electronic book review is back online. A review/essay I wrote in response to Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, titled “First Person, Games, and the Place of Electronic Literature” is among the crop of new offerings. Brian Kim Stefan’s Priveleging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing, which makes a compelling argument for a return in digital poetry to a focus on language as having “some notion of address,” as attempting to communicate intentioned meaning rather than serving as just another form of material. In “Bass Resonace,” John Cayley provides an interesting reading of the graphic and film title work of Saul Bass, digging into a genre that offers some lessons for creators of kintetic poetry.