Monthly Archives: September 2013
Watching Los Angeles Burn
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Stephen Nardi Department of English Princeton University snardi@princeton.edu Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books – Henry Holt & Company, 1998. Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) has been recognized as a modern classic. Davis’s analysis of the impact of an ideology of urban […]
Writing the Body: Problematizing Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Feminism’s Relevance
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Mahmut Mutman Department of Design and Communication Bilkent University mutman@bilkent.edu.tr Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York & London: Routledge, 1997. As the newly branded Cultural Studies makes its way into Western academia, it seems as though we have left a number of dogmas behind. A strange, hybrid blend […]
Pernicious Couplings and Living in the Splice
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Graham J. Murphy Department of English University of Alberta gjmurphy@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. The collection of essays forming the text of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics is the most recent […]
If You Build It, They Will Come
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Uncategorized |
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John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis.London: Routledge, 1998. Last year I found myself staggering down the very long sidewalk of the Las Vegas Strip in a somewhat disoriented state, an Antipodean on his first trip to the United States. There I was, during the middle […]
Prophecy and the Figure of the Reader in Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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James McCorkle mccorkle@epix.net The work of the contemporary experimental poet Susan Howe undertakes the formation as well as retrieval of a prophetic poetics. By shifting the attention from writer to reader there is a similar shift from prophet to prophesy, from the one who prophesies to the oracle’s graphesis–its condition for reading. Howe’s […]
Textual Indigence in the Archive
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Jed Rasula Department of English Queen’s University rasulaj@post.queensu.ca The adjective “encyclopedic” is equivocal: as an enticement to comprehensiveness and mastery, it is awkwardly shadowed by its Enlightenment provenance and tainted by its association with master narratives. Yet the sort of narratives associated with encyclopedism are the very ones most insistently cited for their burlesque […]
Automating Feminism: The Case of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Heather Hicks Department of English Villanova University hhicks@email.vill.edu In his historical review of various American theories of “postindustrialism,” Howard Brick makes the point that “[t]he historical reconstruction of the concept… helps to place the idea of postindustrial society in a new relation with the idea of postmodern culture. Rather than being regarded as corresponding […]
Violence and Reason on the Shoals of Vietnam
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Anthony Burke jetzone@ozemail.com.au “Tell me, pray,” said I, “who is this Mr Kurtz?” “The chief of the Inner Station,” he answered in a short tone, looking away. “He is a prodigy…. He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else. We want… for the guidance of the […]
Publicizing the President’s Privates
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 09, Number 3, May 1999 |
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Loren Glass Center for the Humanities Oregon State University loren.glass@orst.edu For me an audience interminable. –Walt Whitman And I will make a song for the ears of the President. –Walt Whitman On Monday, August 17, 1998, a day that seemed to have gone down in history before it even arrived, […]
The Blair Witch Project: Technology, Repression, and the Evisceration of Mimesis
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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David Banash Department of English The University of Iowa dbanash@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu The Blair Witch Project.Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Perf. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. Given its preposterously low budget, outsider production, and a priori cult status as ludic masterpiece, The Blair Witch Project does not seem […]
Memory, Orality, Literacy, Joyce, and the Imaginary: A Virtual History of Cyberculture
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Donald F. Theall Department of Cultural Studies Trent University dtheall@trentu.ca Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde, NSW: A 21*C Book published by Interface, 1998. What might more properly be referred to by a more prosaic term such as “the digimediatrix” or “the digi-infomatrix” has through the […]
An Academic Exorcism
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Michael Alexander Chaney Department of English Indiana University, Bloomington maxchi@aol.com Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Academic Keywords is that rare sort of polemic that consoles with humor as it enrages us with personal accounts and persuasive analysis of the […]
Of Tea Parties, Poverty Tours, and Tammany Pow-wows; or, How Mr. Clinton Distanced Us All from Pine Ridge
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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H. Kassia Fleisher kass.fleisher@colorado.edu Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian.New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. The week I sit down to read Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian (which Yale UP plans to re-issue in paperback in September), President Clinton takes a “poverty tour.” He stops in rural areas of Kentucky’s Appalachia and Mississippi’s Delta, as […]
Postcolonial Reading
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Mark Sanders Department of English and American Literature Brandeis University Society for the Humanities Cornell University ms248@cornell.edu Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Marx could hold The Science of Logic and the Blue Books together; but that was still only […]
Contesting Globalisms: The Transnationalization of U.S. Cultural Studies
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Claudia Sadowski-Smith Department of American Thought and Language Michigan State University cssmith@msu.edu Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital.Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Duke University Press’s recent publication of […]
Friedrich Kittler’s Media Scenes–An Instruction Manual
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Marcel O’Gorman Director Foreign Language Instructional Technology Environment Tulane University ogorman@tcs.tulane.edu Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays.Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997. Brigadier Whitehead, a veteran of World War II, is taping his heroic adventures at the “Battle of Palermo” on a reel-to-reel, portable tape recorder. Roving about the cluttered room, he speaks […]
Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image of Social Redemption in James Cameron’s Titanic
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Patrick McGee Department of English Louisiana State University pmcgee@gateway.net Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. –Walter Benjamin, “The […]
Theoretical Tailspins: Reading “Alternative” Performance in Spin Magazine
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Patrick McGee Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finnegan@uiuc.edu Media and commerce do not just cover but help construct music subcultures…. Subcultural capital is itself, in no small sense, a phenomenon of the media. –Sarah Thornton, “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave” If you only talk to people who […]
Technical Ex-Communication: How a Former Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Joe Amato Department of English University of Colorado at Boulder joe.amato@colorado.edu I. Imagine: Once upon a time, I left the corporate world to join the academic world, thinking the lofty latter would tower above the corruption of corporate complicity. Yup. I really thought that. Imagine. Picture this: you’re seated at a table […]
Love and the Debasement of Being: Irigaray’s Revisions of Lacan and Heidegger
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Krzysztof Ziarek Department of English University of Notre Dame Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu In Écrits Lacan remarks: “Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because his task is to act in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of […]
“This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions”: What Is the Text of Naked Lunch?
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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Carol Loranger English Department Wright State University carol.loranger@wright.edu William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch appears “by wide public agreement” whenever lists of postmodern texts in English are compiled (Connor 129). Its status as a work of art seems clear. But its textual status is less clear: as yet, no effort has been made to establish […]
Editors’ Announcements
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 1, September 1999 |
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New Co-Editor With this issue, PMC welcomes Jim English, who joins Lisa Brawley as co-editor of the journal. This welcome is more properly a welcome back, as Jim served as review editor from the journal’s founding to 1996. Paula Geyh, who succeeded Jim in that role, will continue to oversee the review section. […]
New Editor
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Uncategorized |
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New Co-Editor With this issue, PMC welcomes Jim English, who joins Lisa Brawley as co-editor of the journal. This welcome is more properly a welcome back, as Jim served as review editor from the journal’s founding to 1996. Paula Geyh, who succeeded Jim in that role, will continue to oversee the review section. Assisting us […]
Notices
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Volume 10, Number 2 January, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC. […]
Utopian Ironies
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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David Schuermer Department of English University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale dschuer@wko.com Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. In reviewing Andrew Ross’s Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, I am reminded […]
Near Collisions: Rhetorical Cultural Studies or a Cultural Rhetorical Studies?
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Brad Lucas Department of English University of Nevada, Reno brad@unr.edu Thomas Rosteck, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999. The thirteen essays in Thomas Rosteck’s At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies discuss connections between the practices that constitute rhetorical studies and those that constitute cultural […]
The Critical Idiom of Postmodernity and Its Contributions to an Understanding of Complexity
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Matthew Abraham Philosophy and Literature Program Purdue University MAbra68114@aol.com Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Routledge, 1998. Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems attempts to bring together developments in neuroscience, linguistics, logic, computer science, the philosophy of science, and poststructural theory in an effort to locate unifying themes […]
Past, Present and Future: New Historicism versus Cultural Materialism
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Jürgen Pieters Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory University of Ghent, Belgium jurgen.pieters@rug.ac.be John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: MacMillan, 1998. One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory–a field dominated since the early eighties by the so-called “historical turn”–has been […]
Veiled and Revealed
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Nezih Erdogan Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture Bilkent University nezih@bilkent.edu.tr Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism.London and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. When feminist studies, as it developed in the Anglo-American world, turned to Third World countries, it produced a discourse which put an emphasis on the situation […]
Brecht Our (Post-) Contemporary
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Steven Helmling Department of English University of Delaware helmling@odin.english.udel.edu Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method.London and New York: Verso, 1998. Fredric Jameson’s oeuvre is daunting for almost every possible reason. Besides its sheer bulk, the difficulty of its themes, and its notoriously demanding prose style, there’s the vast scope of the cultural materials it […]
Grotesque Caricature: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as the Allegory of Its Own Reception
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Stefan Mattessich Department of English Loyola Marymount University blzbub@msn.com Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Perf. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack. Warner Brothers, 1999. Such was the fashion, such the human being; the men were like the paintings of the day; society had taken […]
Otherness
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Tamise Van Pelt Department of English and Philosophy Idaho State University vantamis@isu.edu As half of a signifying binary, the “Other” is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the […]
Stop Making Sense: Fuck ’em and Their Law (… It’s Only I and O but I Like It…)
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Bernd Herzogenrath Bernd.Herzogenrath@post.rwth-aachen.de Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic is always a bit silly. If one does not go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by innumerable examples… –Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 209 Techno […]
Dada Photomontage and net.art Sitemaps
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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George Dillon Department of English University of Washington dillon@u.washington.edu We find ourselves–we with our various discourses–in the midst of a new medium. Which does not, of course, mean we are all experiencing the same thing. HTML hypertext seems to have about as much intrinsic character as tofu. It lends itself to many deployments; people […]
Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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N. Katherine Hayles English Department University of California Los Angeles HAYLES@humnet.ucla.edu Five hundred years of print have made the conventions of the book transparent to us.1 It takes something like Sol Lewitt’s Squares with the Sides and Corners Torn Off to bring into visibility again the convention of the page.2The pages display black squares, […]
Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 2, January 2000 |
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Sianne Ngai Department of English and American Literature and Language Harvard University sngai@fas.harvard.edu There is stupid being in every one. There is stupid being in every one in their living. Stupid being in one is often not stupid thinking or stupid acting. It very often is hard to know it in knowing any one. […]
Notices
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 3, May 2000 |
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Volume 10, Number 3 May, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC. […]
The Openness of an Immanent Temporality
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 3, May 2000 |
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David Pagano English Department Old Dominion University dpagano@vwc.edu E. A. Grosz, ed. Becomings: Explorations of Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Elizabeth Grosz is one of our most able theoretical writers, combining clarity of articulation with originality, perspicacity, and sophistication of thought. Those who follow the sometimes mind-wrenching discourse on time […]
Limited Affinities
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 3, May 2000 |
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Kevin Marzahl English and Cultural Studies Indiana University kmarzahl@indiana.edu Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics.Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999. Two sets of affinities underlie most contemporary American poetic practices. On the one hand, there is a surrealist genealogy which would include the New York […]
Periodizing Postmodernsim
| September 19, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 10, Number 3, May 2000 |
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Timothy Gray English Department College of Staten Island, CUNY gray@postbox.csi.cuny.edu Patricia Juliana Smith, ed. The Queer Sixties. New York: Routledge, 1999. Stephen Miller. The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance.Durham: Duke UP, 1999. When Fredric Jameson tried his hand at periodizing the sixties some years ago, he was engaging in an exercise millions of […]