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TERRAIN
Essays on the New Poetics
eds. David Vichnar & Olga Pek

ISBN 978-80-7308-526-1 (paperback). 208pp
Publication date: December 2014
http://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/terrain/

Within our global-local environment there reverberates a polyphony of realities
that are inter-actual, intersecting, constantly contested, and always in the process
of assuming new forms, forming new hybrids, taking new plunges in transversal
directions. The essays collected in the present volume have been written in and
between London, Paris, Berlin and Prague and first appeared in the arts and poetics
magazine VLAK. As such, the essays position themselves “in between”–internationally,
interculturally, and intertextually–in order to map the terrain of an emergent poetics.
Contributors include: Guillermo Suarez Ara, Matthew Hall, Louis Armand, Jeroen
Nieuwland, David Vichnar & Olga Pek.


HELIXTROLYSIS
Cyberology & the Joycean “Tyrondynamon Machine”
by Louis Armand

ISBN 978-80-7308-539-1 (paperback) 256pp
Publication date: December 2014
http://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/helixtrolysis/

It is an intriguing feature of cybernetics, cognitive science, psychoanalysis,
critical theory & particle physics that at key moments in their recent evolution
their major practitioners have turned to the work of one particular “experimentalist”
writer, James Joyce, in whose key works — Ulysses & Finnegans Wake — they
have sought an articulation of the emergent virtuo-real universe which since the
mid-20th century we have increasingly come to inhabit. From these two books
have directly been drawn the name for the fundamental constituent of the nucleon
(Murray Gell-Mann’s quark), a new model of cognition (Daniel Dennett’s Joycean
machine), a radical cybernetic conception of language (Jacques Derrida’s
Joyceware), a psycho-analytical paradigm (Jacques Lacan’s sinthome), & the
foundations of post-War media theory (Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy,
originally called The Road to Finnegans Wake).This volume examines a series of
counter arguments to the conventional account of literary cybernetics in light of
developments which have accompanied the encounter between critical theory
and cultural studies, namely ‘hypertextuality’ and ‘posthumanism.’ In each instance,
the continuing legacy of Joyce’s works is examined in detail.