Electrac Company

Friend and fellow blogger Jeff has just co-edited a new collection called New Media/New Methods, and it's available for order at Parlor Press. If you are at all interested in film scholarship, academic writing, or new media, I highly recommend picking it up (I just ordered my copy when I saw the announcement on Jeff's blog last night).

Full disclosure: Jeff and several of the contributors in the book are friends, acquaintances, and/or former profs of mine (as you might expect with a book focusing on "The Florida School," my old academic institution). But if I'm biased, it's not only because of personal connections, but because being part of this fabulous hive of intellectual activity means I know just how cool and exciting the work they are all doing really is. Jeff's scholarship is startling in the best ways-- he finds connections between various spaces of theory and pop that I never would've imagined were there, and writes of them with wit and insight (really, his blog should be bookmarked for your daily reading). He's co-assembled a group of writers (including Robert Ray, Greg Ulmer, Michael Jarrett, Craig Saper, Bradley Dilger, Denise Cummings, Ron Broglio), whose work similarly vibrates with energy, mystery, and excitement.

Here's the description of the book:

Representing a specific school of theory emergent in graduates of the University of Florida and working from the concept of electracy, as opposed to literacy, contributors present various heuristics for elaborating new media rhetoric and theory. New Media/New Methods challenges literacy-based understandings of new media, which typically pose such work as hermeneutics or textual interpretation. Rather than grounding their work in hermeneutics, contributors rely on heuretics, or invention, to outline new modes of scholarly discourse reflective of and adapted to digital culture.

Grab a copy now: after all, don't you want to read a form of film and new media critique that seems to function in Francois Truffaut's long-ago definition of great filmmaking: "I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse"?