What is the Electronic Book Review (EBR) and how is it connected to critical writing?

The Electronic Book Reivew (EBR) is a peer-reviewed journal of critical writing produced and published by the emergent digital literary network. It is an example of critical writing today, as writers bring literary concepts into the collaborative networks that are forming now in new media.

In continuous publication since 1994, it is among the longest running open-access, literary-critical journals on the Internet. To take advantage of the Web’s medium-specific constraints, EBR essays do not appear in individual volumes or issues with preset publication dates, a paradigm inherited from print media, but in “threads” according to the topic and semantics of the work. A current project is the publication of a new thread based on materials generated by the 2012 conference of the Electronic Literature Organization (www.eliterature.org).

What is the Electronic Literature Directory and how is it connected to critical writing?

Electronic literature is born-digital literary art that exploits, as its muse and medium, the transmedia possibilities of the digital. It is, according to the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” (Amanda Starling-Gould, ‘feature essay’ presented at http://directory.eliterature.org/node/3706)

Identifying a literary work in a new media environment means, in the first place, tagging the work as literary, and that means defining the critical concepts that we use when talking about a literary work (as opposed to, or rather in tension with, the proliferation of ‘texts’ in today’s new media ecology). By reading, and occasionally ourselves drafting entries for publication in The Electronic Literature Directory (ELD), students in English 240 will have a chance to apply our critical vocabulary and glossaries to the description of new works of literature in new media.