Monthly Archives: September 2013

Arkady Plotnitsky Literature Program Duke University aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu   Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos.New York: Oxford UP, 1997.   Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos (hereafter LC) offers its readers ideas, scientific and philosophical, and a vision (based on these ideas) of a possible future physics. These ideas and this vision stem from […]

Scott Michaelsen Department of English Michigan State University smichael@pilot.msu.edu   José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies.Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.   It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color–presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk… […]

Mark Goble Department of English Stanford University m.goble@leland.stanford.edu   James Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.   Why is it not surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary locates the word “vacationer” as a term used chiefly in the United States? Across the whole complicated spectrum of U.S. […]

Thomas Lavazzi Department of Humanities/English Savannah State University lavazzit@tigerpaw.ssc.peachnet.edu   Mark Russell, ed. Out of Character: Rants, Raves, and Monologues from Today’s Top Performance Artists.New York: Bantam, 1997.   Out of Character anthologizes the work of thirty-one contemporary performance artists in ten times as many pages, from high poptech artists like Laurie Anderson and big-ticket […]

  Christopher Sieving Department of Communication Arts University of Wisconsin at Madison csieving@students.wisc.edu   Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.   In a year that marks the eleventh anniversary of his death, Andy Warhol–artist, filmmaker, icon–continues as a cultural force to be reckoned […]

Nicky Marsh Department of English University of Southampton, UK ebpd0@central.susx.ac.uk   Susan Howe, Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979. New York: New Directions, 1996. and Leslie Scalapino, Green and Black: Selected Writings.Jersey City: Talisman, 1996.   Frame Structures and Green and Black are single-author collections written by two poets associated with the Language movement in American […]

  Mark Nunes et al. Department of English DeKalb College mnunes@dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu   In February of 1997, a dozen individuals began working on a collaborative on-line project entitled “Postmodern Spacings.” We came from various academic and professional fields in North America, Europe, and Australia. Our only initial “guiding principle” was that we were to discuss a […]

Michele Pierson Department of English and Cultural Studies University of Melbourne m.pierson@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au   The November 1997 issue of Wired magazine featured a special report on the future of Hollywood filmmaking (“Hollywood 2.0 Special Report: The People Who Are Reinventing Entertainment”). In the Hollywood of the future there will be no film. Theatres will not be […]

Stefan Mattessich Literature Board University of California, Santa Cruz hamglik@sirius.com     Remedios Varo, “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” 1961. Reprinted by permission.1   Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines…. –Deleuze and Guattari, A […]

Scott DeShong Department of English Quinebaug Valley Community-Technical College spdes@conncoll.edu   In the following essay, I will read certain poems by Sylvia Plath to demonstrate a way of reading that derives from the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, ethics requires one to face others in such a way that the incommensurable weight of […]

Gregg Lambert Department of English and Textual Studies Syracuse University glambert@syr.edu   One day, perhaps, there will no longer be any such thing as Art, only Medicine.   –Le Clézio   Introduction to the Literary Clinic   The title of this essay recalls an earlier question from Nietszche’s famous “On the Uses and Abuses of […]

Simon Chesterman Magdalen College–Oxford University simon.chesterman@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk   Overture: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed. We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will […]

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Richard Quinn Department of English The University of Iowa Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu   Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.   Talk-poet David Antin got it right when he argued that “it […]

Julian Levinson Department of English and Comparative Literature Columbia University jal15@columbia.edu   Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race In America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998.   During the summer of 1986, when Hip-Hop music was just becoming a fixture in the panorama of American pop culture, I sat […]