Monthly Archives: September 2013

Jason Camlot English Department Concordia University camlot@vax2.concordia.ca   John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds., Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.   Consider the following “true” story as an exemplum for approaching the idea of the Victorian postmodern: in the mid-1990s, artist and critic Todd Alden asked […]

  David Herman Department of English North Carolina State University dherman@unity.ncsu.edu   Roy Harris, Saussure and His Interpreters. New York: New York UP, 2001.   The author of a 1983 English translation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, as well as two previous books centering on Saussure’s theories of language (Reading Saussure and […]

  Janet Holtman Department of English Pennsylvania State University jmh403@psu.edu   Power “produces reality” before it represses. Equally it produces truth before it ideologizes, abstracts or masks. –Gilles Deleuze, Foucault   In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson distinguishes between a “properly Marxian notion of an all-embracing and all-structuring mode […]

Christopher Douglas Department of English Furman University christopher.douglas@furman.edu   We are about four or five years into the formation of a new discipline, digital game studies. Though by one account computer games have been around for more than four decades (Aarseth), and by another computer and video game sales in the United States are rivaling […]

David Rando Department of English Cornell University dpr27@cornell.edu   Since the September Eleventh airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, it is difficult to imagine American readers responding to the opening sentences of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbowin quite the same ways as they had previously. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, […]

Bradley Butterfield Department of English University of Wisconsin, La Crosse butterfi.brad@uwlax.edu   In the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act. . . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the […]

      Volume 14, Number 1 September, 2003 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. […]

Theresa Smalec Performance Studies New York University tks201@nyu.edu   Review of: Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002.   Scholars who take up Fiona Buckland’s Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making will step into the vastly underexplored arena that Buckland defines as “improvised social dancing in queer […]

Valerie Karno English Department University of Rhode Island karno@uri.edu   Review of: Scarry, Elaine. Who Defended the Country? Elaine Scarry in A New Democracy Forum On Citizenship, National Security, and 9/11. Eds. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. Boston: Beacon, 2003.   The collection, “Who Defended the Country,” with title essay by Elaine Scarry and reply […]

Diane Davis Division of Rhetoric and Department of English University of Texas at Austin ddd@mail.utexas.edu    Review of: Ronell, Avital. Stupidity.Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.   It takes a lot of courage to write a book about stupidity. And to call that book simply Stupidity, not even bothering to frame the term in a […]

Del Doughty Department of English Huntington College ddoughty@huntington.edu   Review of: N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines.Mediawork Pamphlet. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002.   The first thing I noticed about N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines was its design: its slimness (138 pages) and its texture. The pages are printed on the heavy, glossy paper typical of fashion […]

Claudia Brodsky Lacour Department of Comparative Literature Princeton University cblacour@princeton.edu   Review of: Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the “Two Cultures.”Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002.   In The Knowable and the Unknowable, Arkady Plotnitsky takes on (at least) two unenviable double tasks. He endeavors to explain […]

Brad Butterfield Department of English University of Wisconsin, La Crosse butterfi.brad@uwlax.edu   Leonard Wilcox is right that the conception of symbolic exchange has continued to inform Baudrillard’s work up to the present, but until 9/11 Baudrillard had stopped using the language of symbolic exchange, preferring instead to speak in terms of “seduction,” “fatal strategies,” and […]

Leonard Wilcox Department of American Studies University of Canterbury Leonard.Wilcox@canterbury.ac.nz   . . . at the height of their coherence, the redoubled signs of the code are haunted by the abyss of reversal. –Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death   In his article “The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good and Evil,” Bradley […]

Peter Yoonsuk Paik Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee pypaik@uwm.edu   One of the most well-publicized hypotheses regarding the terror of 9/11 is the notion that religious fantasies played a major role in inspiring the militants of al-Qaeda to launch their suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and […]

Steven Helmling Department of English University of Delaware helmling@udel.edu   Fredric Jameson years ago characterized Adorno’s chief critical device or method as the “historical trope” (Marxism and Form 3-59), so it shouldn’t strike anyone as a novel claim that Adorno’s “constellation” displays affinities with other now-familiar devices of modernist art and literature–Eisensteinian montage, cubist collage, […]

Christy L. Burns Department of English College of William and Mary clburn@wm.edu   In 1997, Thomas Pynchon published Mason & Dixon, his much anticipated history of America written from the perspectives of the astronomer and surveyor sent over from England to draw the famous boundary line. Their work was necessitated by a long-standing dispute between […]

Chris Bongie Department of English Queen’s University bongiec@qsilver.queensu.ca   Put me in a room with a great writer, I grovel. Put me in with Roseanne, I throw up. –Jamaica Kincaid1   When Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to serve as guest consultant for a special women’s issue of The New Yorker in 1995, Antiguan-American novelist […]