Lennon, Brian. "Gaming the System." Review article: Mark
McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative
Writing (Harvard, 2009); David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of
Computation (Harvard, 2009). EBR: Electronic Book
Review, September 2009 (16,164 words).
Abstract
It cannot be denied that the works here under review are saying
something new, if by "new" we mean also that which, far from being
discovered in uncharted territory, was all along hidden, as it were,
in plain sight. Sometimes, it is a matter of the structural
amplification of scale through which the matter (the material,
and its mattering) of context itself thwarts the
circumscription of the phenomenological object, by reorganizing it
from within (its image, as it were, re-taken at higher resolution); at
other times, it seems necessary to look through the plane of
the real, with and at that other, imaginative world of remonstrantive
interpretation called ideology critique. Both are flexible and
adaptive forms of the scientism through which the literary humanities
in the United States, in its retransmission of French intellectual
struggle, mixes discourse-analytic tactics of parallel delineation
with hermeneutic strategies of serial penetration, and through which
both its Comtean and its Marxist positivisms express, as François
Dosse has put it of their transatlantic progenitors, "a certain degree
of [Western] self-hatred."
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