NEW MEDIA THEORY Series Editor, Byron Hawk 327 pages, including photographs, bibliography, and index. (c) 2012 by Parlor Press AVATAR EMERGENCY is Gregory L. Ulmer's fourth book featuring the EmerAgency, an online virtual consultancy for the digital age. This time his point of departure is Paul Virilio's Generalized Accident from which he develops and theorizes the new concepts of Flash Reason, and specifically Avatar, which serves as the site for electrate identity formation in the twenty-first century. I have taught Ulmer's work on electracy for years, and his theoretical sophistication as well as the practical ambition and applicability of his work never ceases to amaze me. With Avatar Emergency, Ulmer shows once again that he is at the top of his game; I am positively thrilled to share this new and very timely treasure trove of a book with my students. -JAN RUNE HOLMEVIK, author of Inter/Vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy Ulmer advances a ratio: "Avatar is to electracy what 'self' is to literacy, or 'spirit' to orality." He explores this "emergent logic through the invention of concept avatar." He begins, urgently, by asking: "What might wisdom be today, upon what authority might it be grounded, . . . what vision of well-being?" Perpetually asking the questions, Ulmer searches for "a vital anecdote" as an antidote to the "internet accident" by way of "flash reason." He claims, "Within this frame I present, in the genre of Mystory Internet Invention], what I have come to understand about living, my decision to become a professor of the Humanities and the lifestyle embraced as part of that choice." He invites his readers, thereby, to discover their own Mystory (mystery). Their own wisdom. After all, he explains: "Concept avatar must be not only understood, but undergone." My advice: Undergo the book -VICTOR J. VITANZA, author of Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape GREGORY L. ULMER is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses in Hypermedia, E-Lit, and Heuretics. He is also the Joseph Bueys Chair in the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Ulmer's books include Applied Grammatology (1985), Teletheory (1989), Heuretics (1994), Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2005), and Miami Virtue (2011

Originally published in 1984. In Applied Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer provides an extraordinary introduction to the third, "applied" phase of grammatology, the "science of writing," outlined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. Ulmer looks to the later experimental works of Derrida (beginning with Glas and continuing through Truth in Painting and The Post Card). In these, he discovers a critical methodology radically different from the deconstruction for which Derrida is known. At the same time, he finds the source of a new pedagogy for all the humanities, one based on grammatology and appropriate to the era of audiovisual communications in which we live. Detractors of Derrida often accuse him of superficial wordplay and of using images and puns as nonfunctional subversions of academic conventions. Ulmer argues that there is, in fact, a fully developed use of homonyms in Derrida's style, which produces its own distinctive knowledge and insight. Derrida's experiments with images, moreover-his expansion of descriptions of everyday objects such as umbrellas, matchboxes, and post cards into cognitive models-serve to reveal a simplicity underlying intellectual discourse, which could be used to eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies. Comparing the stylistic innovations of Derrida with Jacques Lacan's use of puns and diagrams, with the German performance artist Joseph Beuys's demonstration of models, and with the "montage writing" of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Ulmer explores the possibility of deriving a postmodernist pedagogy from Derrida's texts. The first study to suggest the full potential of the program available in Derrida's writings, Applied Grammatology is also the first outline of a Derridean alternative to deconstructionism. With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

NEW MEDIA THEORY Series Editor, Byron Hawk 327 pages, including photographs, bibliography, and index. (c) 2012 by Parlor Press AVATAR EMERGENCY is Gregory L. Ulmer's fourth book featuring the EmerAgency, an online virtual consultancy for the digital age. This time his point of departure is Paul Virilio's Generalized Accident from which he develops and theorizes the new concepts of Flash Reason, and specifically Avatar, which serves as the site for electrate identity formation in the twenty-first century. I have taught Ulmer's work on electracy for years, and his theoretical sophistication as well as the practical ambition and applicability of his work never ceases to amaze me. With Avatar Emergency, Ulmer shows once again that he is at the top of his game; I am positively thrilled to share this new and very timely treasure trove of a book with my students. -JAN RUNE HOLMEVIK, author of Inter/Vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy Ulmer advances a ratio: "Avatar is to electracy what 'self' is to literacy, or 'spirit' to orality." He explores this "emergent logic through the invention of concept avatar." He begins, urgently, by asking: "What might wisdom be today, upon what authority might it be grounded, . . . what vision of well-being?" Perpetually asking the questions, Ulmer searches for "a vital anecdote" as an antidote to the "internet accident" by way of "flash reason." He claims, "Within this frame I present, in the genre of Mystory Internet Invention], what I have come to understand about living, my decision to become a professor of the Humanities and the lifestyle embraced as part of that choice." He invites his readers, thereby, to discover their own Mystory (mystery). Their own wisdom. After all, he explains: "Concept avatar must be not only understood, but undergone." My advice: Undergo the book -VICTOR J. VITANZA, author of Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric and Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing: Chaste Rape GREGORY L. ULMER is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses in Hypermedia, E-Lit, and Heuretics. He is also the Joseph Bueys Chair in the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Ulmer's books include Applied Grammatology (1985), Teletheory (1989), Heuretics (1994), Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2005), and Miami Virtue (2011

In "Heuretics"--a word defined as "the branch of logic that treats the art of discovery or invention"--Gregory Ulmer sets forth new methods appropriate for conducting cultural studies research in an age of electronic hypermedia.