Review: E-Crit

E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities #

By Marcel O'Gorman University of Toronto Press, 2006

O'Gorman, Marcel. 2006. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-9037-9 (cloth), 978-1-4875-7220-4 (paper).

Marcel O'Gorman writes E-Crit to explain, and to defend, an actual degree program: the Electronic Critique concentration he ran at the University of Detroit Mercy, an interdisciplinary bricolage of English, Communications, Computer Information Systems, and Fine Art built on what O'Gorman calls a "Frankfurt School / poststructural sensibility." The book's stated ambition exceeds the program. O'Gorman argues that deconstruction's revolutionary promise died somewhere in the 1990s when it got "displaced into technology," diluted into hypertext theory and digital archiving projects that formalized old scholarly habits rather than inventing new ones. His proposed antidote is "hypericonomy," a method of scholarly writing built on puns, visual wordplay, and what he calls "the remainder" (the nonsense, jokes, and false etymologies that conventional academic prose represses). While the book presents itself as argument, demonstration, and case study at once, I will argue that its lasting value lies in the third role: E-Crit endures as an unusually candid record of what happens when a radical curricular vision meets the unyielding machinery of accreditation, workload, and habit. In this review, I will show this by taking up 1) the final chapter's institutional postmortem, 2) the Blake chapter's test of the method, 3) the book's datedness, and 4) its Guillorian backbone.

The strongest chapter is the one about failure #

Counterintuitively, the book's most valuable material is not its theoretical core but its final chapter, "From Ecriture to E-Crit," which functions as an honest institutional postmortem. O'Gorman reproduces an email from an anonymous colleague on the university's Future of Computing Committee describing exactly how a genuinely radical curricular vision gets ground down: workload concerns, accreditation requirements from bodies like ABET that leave no room for experimental restructuring, and a default deference to "we have always done it this way." He admits the committee's ambitious vision statement "did not achieve any recognizable impact whatsoever." He notes, without much further editorializing, that the Electronic Critique program's administrative home was migrating from the College of Liberal Arts to the School of Architecture as he wrote the chapter, an allegory whose meaning he cannot fully control. Most academic books about pedagogical innovation end on triumphant case studies or forward-looking manifestos; O'Gorman's ends by documenting, in real time, his own project's institutional erosion. In my estimation, this candor gives the whole book a credibility that its more exuberant early chapters occasionally spend down.

The method, tested against Blake #

The book's central methodological claim, that scholarly writing should mobilize puns, visual jokes, and nonsense as tools of critique rather than treating them as embarrassments to be edited out, gets its fullest workout in chapter 3's reading of William Blake through Peter Ramus's Renaissance dialectical diagrams. O'Gorman is a genuinely capable Blake scholar, and the chapter's core insight, that Blake's illuminated printing constitutes an early revolt against the Ramist tree-diagram logic that still structures how universities sort knowledge into discrete, hierarchical disciplines, is a real contribution. The trouble lies less in the argument than in its vehicle. O'Gorman's own prose performs the hypericonomy it describes, chasing puns and etymological detours (the extended riff on "delirium" as a term rooted in "going out of the furrow" is emblematic) that sometimes illuminate the Blake material and sometimes just interrupt it. A reader sympathetic to the Derridean and Ulmer-derived tradition O'Gorman draws on, particularly Gregory Ulmer's concept of "heuretics," will find the payoff worth the detours; a reader looking for a sustained argument about Blake, Ramus, and disciplinary formation will occasionally wish the jokes came with an off switch.

A period piece, and O'Gorman knows it #

Reading the book two decades after publication surfaces a problem O'Gorman himself half-anticipates. The introduction is candid that the Electronic Critique program was born partly as "a knee-jerk response to the dot.com boom," and the book's confidence that web design skills combined with critical theory would produce a durable new disciplinary formation reads, from 2026, as a fairly specific artifact of that moment. The chapter on hypertext theory is even more dated by its own admission: O'Gorman describes the books on his shelf under that heading as already looking "artefactual" by the time he was writing in the mid-2000s, relics of a brief window when scholars believed hyperlinked, non-linear text would materialize deconstruction's critique of linear reading. He was right that hypertext theory aged badly; he does not extend the same skepticism to his own proposed replacement, and "hypericonomy" has not become a recognized method in digital humanities scholarship in the years since. The book's account of "new media" itself, organized around Web design, McDonald's Happy Meal magnifying glasses, and 1990s discourse networks, belongs to an internet that predates social platforms, mobile computing, and machine learning entirely; this anachronism is not a fair charge against a 2006 book on its own terms, but it does limit how much of the diagnosis of "techno-bureaucratic culture" transfers to the platform-capitalism landscape scholars now work within.

Working in the shadow of Guillory #

The book's real theoretical backbone, more than its Derrida or Deleuze citations, is John Guillory's Cultural Capital, and O'Gorman's extended engagement with Guillory's argument about the "fetishization of rigor" in the humanities is where the book makes its most durable case. Extending Guillory, O'Gorman argues that digital archiving projects reproduce the same rigor-fetish that once drove literary theory's institutionalization, now dressed in XML markup instead of footnotes; this sharp point holds up better than the book's more speculative claims about hypericonomy's revolutionary potential. Here the book is also most honest about its own limits. O'Gorman concedes that changing a syllabus, in Guillory's terms, does not change the institutional structures that determine what counts as legitimate scholarship, and the final chapter's account of the Future of Computing Committee's failure essentially demonstrates that Guillorian point against O'Gorman's own project; the critique and the case study are flip sides of the same coin.

Verdict #

E-Crit is a genuine artifact of a specific moment in digital humanities, a moment when the field still believed curriculum reform and a new scholarly prose style might do the institutional work that critical theory's academic institutionalization in the 1980s and 1990s had failed to do. Its Blake chapter is a real, if unevenly executed, contribution to Romanticist media theory, and its unusually candid final chapter, documenting the actual institutional failure of the program the book exists to justify, is more valuable than most digital humanities books' celebratory case studies. But the central proposal, hypericonomy as a general method for scholarly writing, never quite escapes its own cleverness, and the book's confidence that a change in academic discourse could reshape "the larger, more unyielding structure of an institution" reads, in light of its own final chapter's evidence, as a claim the book itself ends up disproving. Read it now less as a working method and more as a self-aware record of what digital humanities optimism looked like just before the field reckoned with how little curricular tinkering could do against accreditation bodies, workload, and institutional inertia; in this way E-Crit teaches, against its own hopes, a deflationary lesson about curricular revolution in the modern university writ large.