Monthly Archives: September 2013

Brian Baker School of Education and the Humanities North East Wales Institute of Higher Education BakerB@newi.ac.uk   Review of: Heaven, an exhibition of postmodern art curated by Dorit Le Vitte Harten. The Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany, 30 July 1999-17 October 1999, and the Tate Gallery to the North, Liverpool, U.K., 9 December 1999-27 February 2000.   […]

David Anshen Department of Comparative Literature SUNY Stony Brook Danshen@ic.sunysb.edu   Michael Sprinker, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx. “New York: Verso, 1999.   The whole point, however is that Marx… did not confine himself to ‘economic theory’ in the ordinary sense of the term, that, while explaining the structure […]

Genevieve Abravanel English Department Duke University ga3@duke.edu   John Carlos Rowe, ed. “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.   This collection of essays emerged out of four years of discussion and dispute among humanities scholars at the Critical Theory Institute of UC Irvine. What the contributors, including David Lloyd, […]

Jim Rosenberg jr@amanue.com Part I: Background: Linear Prosody1 Dimensions of Inequality Among Syllables   Prosody in the English language proceeds from the axiom that not all syllables are created equal; many effects in prosody derive from the time-plot of these inequalities along various dimensions. The most well known of these is the familiar stress-degree, but […]

Lawrence Johnson University of Queensland lojoj@bigpond.com   To calculate the loss–is this the challenge that Nicolas Abraham has given to Jacques Derrida? Between 1959 and 1975, the year of Abraham’s unexpected death, they were close friends, sharing what Elisabeth Roudinesco describes as “a marginal position in relation to the dominant philosophical discourse of the day, […]

Steven Helmling Department of English University of Delaware helmling@udel.edu   “History is what hurts,” writes Fredric Jameson in an oft-quoted phrase that many readers seem to take as a motto for his work as a whole. If Jameson matters, it is to the presumably minority audience for whom the anodyne declaration of the “end of […]

James D. Faubion Department of Anthropology Rice University jdf@rice.edu   Are we simply who we choose to be? We know well enough the poles between which answers to this question have tended to oscillate for at least the past century. Determinists of various stripes–biological, psychological, sociological–have insisted that we are not. Decisionists (of whom Sartre, […]

  Evans Chan evanschan@aol.com   As Hong Kong’s anti-climactic 1997 decolonization came and went, the British (post)colony experienced a tumultuous decade–it was discovered by the international media, by Hollywood, and finally by the post-modernists. Maybe the question put by a contemporary academic Sepulveda to a latter-day Bartholomew de Las Casas should be: “Are they True […]

Lasse Thomassen Department of Government University of Essex lathom@essex.ac.uk   Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.London: Verso, 1999.   The Ticklish Subject is a recent work by Slovene philosopher, social theorist, and Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, who has produced books at the pace of more than one per […]

Rebecca Rauve Department of English Purdue University rrauve1@purdue.edu   Review of: John Johnston, Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.   The discovery of electronic means to code and transfer information. An increasingly machinic understanding of consciousness, brought about by advances in neurobiology and genetics. The creation of […]

Robert S. Oventile English and Foreign Languages Division Pasadena City College rsoventile@paccd.cc.ca.us   Review of: Tom Cohen, et al., eds., Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.   As we confront the triumph of USA-centrism (“institutionalize diversity locally, maximize profit globally”), to trace our historicity, defined by […]

Brian Finney Department of English California State University, Long Beach bhfinney@earthlink.net   Review of: Will Self, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys.London: Bloomsbury, 1998.   Where Kingsley Amis has come to be seen as the father figure of British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, and his son, Martin Amis, has replaced him in […]

Mark Mossman Department of English and Journalism Western Illinois University shourd@gtec.com Introduction   My body is a postmodern text. I have had sixteen major surgeries in thirty years and I am about to have a kidney transplant. My left leg has been amputated and I have only four fingers on one hand. I walk with […]

Lee Spinks Department of English Literature University of Edinburgh elilss@srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk 1. The Problem of “Genesis” and “Structure” This paper began as an attempt to make sense of the enigma presented by two sentences in a postscript and a paragraph in an interview. In an addendum to his influential The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, […]

David Herman Department of English North Carolina State University dherman@unity.ncsu.edu   Sometime between 1966 and 1968, Roland Barthes began to lose faith that there might be a science of the text. This, to be sure, was not an individualized crisis of belief; it was part of a wider transformation at work in the history of […]

Hanjo Berressem Dept. of American Literature and Culture University of Cologne hanjo.berressem@uni-koeln.de   Elective affinities. …to fold onto each other two texts that have similar diagrams and thus to open up a field of intricate resonances: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (New York: Holt, 1997), a text about the genesis of America, and Michel Serres’s […]

Sara L. Knox Humanities Group, School of Cultural Inquiry University of Western Sydney S.Knox@uws.edu.au   The ideological work of narratives of extreme violence is the subject of this essay. The apocryphal confessions of Henry Lee Lucas will be examined in order to show that narrative authority has greater power than fact, even where that fact […]