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"?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Much thanks for the shout out. I like that Truffaut quote. Where is it from?
Brian Doan said…
Hey Jeff-- my pleasure! Can't wait to read the book. The quote is from Truffaut's intro to a collection of his Cahiers reviews called THE FILMS OF MY LIFE (I think it was published in '75). It's one of my favorite quotes about filmmaking (and by extension, film critique).
Anonymous said…
It's so funny--I was just talking about electracy and Ulmer's work yesterday with one of my colleagues here. Can't wait to read this.
Brian Doan said…
Ulmer's work is great, isn't it? My favorite description that I heard once was that Ulmer's ideas are like time bombs-- you take the class and it plants in your head, and a few years later, you're working on something and it goes off-- "Aha! THAT'S how it fits!" I think that's true, and I love work that constantly renews and surprises that way.

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