E-crit : digital media, critical theory and the humanities /

O'Gorman (English, Univ. of Detroit Mercy) hopes that this book on "hypericonomy" (a "multi-modal, non-sequential, electronic mode of discourse") will supplement John Guillory's Cultural Capital (1993) and extend and apply Friedrich Kittler's argument in Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990). O'Gorman's book is, in fact, a revolutionary book full of chic ideas--"electracity," picture theory, animated GIF, transactivity, visual puncepts, choral squares, ocular madness, mystories, popcycles, cryptonomy, and so on. It is also a difficult book: difficult to follow if one does not have grounding in avant-garde arts, seminal works on the new media, and deconstructionist theory; difficult to endure if one acknowledges citizenship in the "republic of scholars" (the logocentric, discipline-oriented education establishment); difficult to ignore (and impossible to put down) if one believes that critical theory in the humanities has reached an impasse and requires a revolutionary wind to get it moving again. E-crit joins such other important sources as Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (CH, Nov'93, 31-1334), Carl Raschke's The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (2003), and Gregory Ulmer's Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994). ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. E. Gibbons Our Lady of the Lake University