Month: April 2012

I wrote a riposte to Stuart Moulthrop’s essay, “See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media,” in the electronic book review. Halfway through “Fearful Symmetry,” the fifth issue of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic graphic narrative Watchmen, an assassin tries to kill the world’s smartest man. Adrian Veidt, the Watchman formerly known as … Continue reading A short essay on “Watchmen” and platform studies at “ebr”

I’ve written yet another LARB book review, this time on Ben Marcus’s fascinating The Flame Alphabet. In his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes announced the revolutionary overthrow of the writer by the reader. Building on the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” Barthes argued that a ceaseless … Continue reading Review of Ben Marcus’s “The Flame Alphabet”