Shackelford - Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction

This book bears the marks of its intellectual and scholarly emergence, traversing several academic institutions, scholarly fields, and lively, ongoing dialogues. A few of these catalyzing forces and influences deserve special mention and recognition. Thomas Foster and Eva Cherniavsky have had an irreplaceable influence on this project since its earliest threads emerged through my dissertation work, under their advising, at Indiana University, Bloomington. I could not have found a more insightful and enlightening dissertation director than Tom. They continue to motivate me with their practice and vision of what scholarly work might entail. Purnima Bose and Helen Gremillion were similarly generous and circumspect contributors to the earliest trajectories that led to this book. Since I first attended the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Buffalo, New York, to participate on a systems theory and literature panel, this diverse community of scholars, Katherine Hayles, especially, has been an incredible source of critical exchange and a much-needed, recognizable context for an area of study that has been peripheral until quite recently. Many of the ideas developed here have grown out of those conversations, networks, and exchanges. During a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn State University, Michael Brub and the American literary studies working group offered me an attentive audience and feedback on an earlier version of . More recently, my colleagues at the Rochester Institute of Technologys College of Liberal Arts and, particularly our informal junior faculty writing group, have provided a crucial transdisciplinary audience for the project. Doris Borelli, Katie Terezakis, Elena Sommers, Cecilia-Ovesdotter Alm, and Sharon Beckford-Foster have been meticulous, thoughtful readers and provided insightful comments on individual chapters, as well as invaluable support and humor through the process of writing and revising.

The intellectual prompting and friendship of Louise Economides and Cristina Iuli are a continual source of insight and inspiration for me to pursue Page viii trajectories that realign expected scholarly and intellectual affiliations. I owe my first realization of humanities research as a collaborative, interdisciplinary activity to my experiences organizing and hosting the Thinking Materiality: Language, Epistemology, and Embodiment lecture series with them, as well as other stellar Indiana University faculty. This also initiated my first genuine interactions with scholars such as Andy Clark who made a lasting influence on my lines of inquiry here. The final stages of the book have also been thoroughly invigorated by Loss Pequeo Glazier and others active in the International E-Poetry Organizations events that he has organized at University of Buffalo, Kingston University, and the University of Mayagez over the past three years. His sustained efforts to build on the communities of practice catalyzing and sustaining the digital literary have fed their way into my own work in a number of significant ways. I also owe an incredible debt to my thoughtful editor, Thomas Dwyer, for his unflagging support and guidance of my book project. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for the University of Michigan Press. Their feedback was very helpful to me in consolidating the books framing for multiple audiences.

The process of writing and revising this book has also been punctuated by visits and conversations with my mother Lynn; my sisters Kathy and Amy; my brilliant, kind, and most special niece Amber; and countless walks with Clyde the unstoppable, yet accommodating beagle-mix. A continual source of insight and a welcome reorienting of my usual trains of thought, they have each found their way into my thinking and purpose here. To them I remain especially grateful.

An earlier version of was originally published as Counter-networks in a Network Society: Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead, Postmodern Culture 16.3 (2006). Copyright 2006 Laura Shackelford and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Revised and reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.