Monthly Archives: September 2013

Dana Cuff Department of Architecture and Urban Design University of California, Los Angeles dcuff@ucla.edu   “For it is a simple matter to love one’s neighbor when he is distant, but it is a different matter in proximity.” –Jacques-Alain Miller (79-80)   Figure 1: Spite Fence Eadweard Muybridge, San Francisco (1878)[1] Image used by permission of […]

Laura O’Connor Department of English University of California, Irvine loconnor@uci.edu   This article explores the influence of linguicism–discrimination against others on the basis of language and speaking style–on the poetics and politics of literary Creoles by examining the “Synthetic Scots” of modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. When languages that have previously been separate are brought into […]

Robert Meister Department of Politics University of California, Santa Cruz meister@ucsc.edu Proximity and Ethics   Since the fall of communism, there has been a growing literature on the responsibility of the “world community” to “never again” stand by while neighbors commit atrocities against neighbors (Power, “Never Again”).1 This literature has yet to be reformulated as […]

Rei Terada Departments of English and Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine terada@uci.edu   Ethics and Politics of Proximity reflects on the contemporary state of thought about proximate others, whether they be like or unlike oneself, neighbors, friends, rivals, or enemies. Coming from disparate disciplines (politics, literary studies, and architecture) and using heterogeneous principles, these […]

Christopher Kocela Department of English Georgia State University engcpk@langate.gsu.edu   Maurice Yacowar is right that The Sopranos “bears the critical analysis routinely accorded good literature, drama, and films” (19). Yet critical discussion of the program so far has not considered its interest in race. This is certainly not for lack of provocation. In almost every […]

Steven Helmling Department of English University of Delaware helmling@udel.edu   As was already pointed out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is–as trivialities […]

Søren Pold Multimedia Studies and Comparative Literature University of Aarhus pold@multimedia.au.dk   Until now, digital arts have largely been understood to belong in traditional genres or forms of art: we are said to have electronic literature, net.art, or electronic, techno music. Sometimes interesting discussions have arisen concerning the very ontology of digital art, and questions […]

      Volume 16, Number 2 January, 2006     Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society  

David Banash Department of English & Journalism Western Illinois University D-Banash@wiu.edu   Review of: Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh, Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto, 2004.   Imagining the work of William S. Burroughs through emerging theories of globalization promises to keep an extraordinary and difficult body of […]

Patrick Query English Department Loyola University, Chicago pquery@luc.edu   Review of: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Architecture. Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. 22 February-2 June 2003.   Figure 1: World Trade Center, 1997. Hiroshi Sugimoto Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2004   One of the most useful points Nicholas Mirzoeff makes […]

Allan Borst Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign borst@uiuc.edu   Review of: David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.   In The New Imperialism, David Harvey demonstrates once again the adaptability and durability of a critical theory that grafts geography onto cultural studies and historical materialism. In publishing his Clarendon Lectures […]

Chloé Taylor Department of Philosophy University of Toronto chloe.taylor@utoronto.ca   In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas opposes the Greek interest in aesthetics, luminosity, and the plastic form to the rejection of the image in Hebraic philosophy and ethics. Christianity, in making the Word flesh, repeats the Greek desire for the visible, the artistically manifested need […]

Justin Vicari justinvicari@verizon.net I   If only because of his difficult and unenviable historical position as a postwar German (he was born in 1945), Fassbinder could not escape bearing witness to the destructive impact of the Holocaust in every frame of his films. I believe absolutely without question that the Six Million were the most […]

Martin Hipsky Department of English Ohio Wesleyan University mahipsky@owu.edu   Being lectured by the President on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in the country. Senator John Kerry, televised presidential debate, 13 October 2004   In the autumn of 2001, novelist Jonathan Franzen said of […]

Oliver Harris Department of American Studies Keele University o.c.g.harris@ams.keele.ac.uk Consistent Scrutiny   In the last decade of the twentieth century it seemed to some that a breakthrough was taking place in the longstanding isolation of interpretive criticism and textual scholarship. It may be premature to speak “in retrospect,” but it doesn’t appear that the theoretical […]

Eu Jin Chua The London Consortium eujinchuaemail@gmail.com   Alter Egos Ventriloquism–the act of speaking through a surrogate body–is a frequent device in the work of American performance artist Laurie Anderson. In many of her installations and performances, Anderson herself does not speak as such–rather, she speaks through alter egos, usually technologically generated, who ventriloquize her […]