Synopses & Reviews
Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary
techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs.
Steve Tomasula's work is redefining the form of the novel, reinventing the practice of reading, and wrestling with the most urgent questions raised by massive transformations of media and biotechnologies. His work not only charts these changes, it formulates the problems that we have making meaning in our radically changing technological contexts. Vast in scope, inventive in form, and intimate in voice, his novels, short stories, and essays are read and taught by a surprisingly diverse array of scholars in fields ranging from contemporary experimental writing and literary criticism to the history of science, biotechnology and bioart, book studies, and digital humanities.
About the Author
David Banash is Professor of English at Western Illinois University, USA. He is the author of Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, the Age of Consumption (2013) and co-editor of Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things (2013). His essays and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, PopMatters, Postmodern Culture, Reconstruction, and the Iowa Review.
Table of Contents
1. “Variations on a Theme”: the (re)Invention of the Human in Vas: An Opera in Flatland
Sylvie Bauer (Université Rennes 2, France)
2. The Great American Novel: System Update
Kathi Inman Berens (University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication, USA)
3. Tomasula's Book
R. M. Berry (Florida State University, USA)
4. Fabrications in a Complex Mirror: Steve Tomasula's Turbulent Fiction
Gerald Bruns (University of Notre Dame, USA)
5. Literary Archaeologies in The Book of Portraiture
Flore Chevaillier (Central State University, USA)
6. The Material Is the Message: Body as Text/Text as Body in Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera in Flatland
Anthony Enns (Dalhousie University, Canada)
7. A Book, an Atlas, and an Opera: Steve Tomasula's Fictions of Science as Science Fiction
Pawel Frelik (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland)
8. Spatiality and Print, Temporality and Digital Media: Media-Specific Strategies in Steve Tomasula's The Book of Portraiture and TOC
N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University, USA)
9. The Work of Art After the Mechanical Age
Mary Holland (SUNY, New Paltz, USA)
10. Intermediality in Steve Tomasula's