Monthly Archives: September 2013

    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu     Journal and Book Announcements: 1) _Science Fiction Studies_ #55: Postmodernism and Science Fiction […]

Melynda Huskey Department of English North Carolina State University   “Heard any good jokes lately?”   –Pee-Wee at the MTV Music Awards   It’s been six months since “Pee-Wee’s Big Misadventure” was released to an eager public; the July 26th arrest of Paul Reubens for indecent exposure spurred renewed interest in what had been a […]

Susan Schultz Department of English University of Hawaii <schultz@uhccvm>   Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.   Bronk, William. Living Instead. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991.   I was in a large class at USC when he [Schoenberg] said quite bluntly to all of us, ‘My purpose in teaching you […]

James Morrison Department of English North Carolina State University   Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Edited by Andrew Horton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.   Comedy’s not pretty–as the title of an early-eighties Steve Martin album instructed us–and to judge from Comedy/Cinema/Theory it’s not very funny either. Peter Brunette on the Three Stooges: “In the refusal to have […]

Lisa M. Heilbronn Department of Sociology St. Lawrence University <lhei@slumus>   Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games; From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.   What are we talking about when we talk about media “effects”? This may be one of the most […]

Joseph Dumit History of Consciousness Program University of California-Santa Cruz <jdumit@cats.ucsc.edu / jdumit@cats.BITNET>   Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1991.   “If we want technology to liberate rather than destroy us, then we–the techno/peasants–have to assume responsibility for it.” –The Techno/Peasant Survival Manual 1   Perhaps the question is, […]

Neil Larsen Department of Modern Languages Northeastern University <nlarsen@lynx.northeastern.edu>   Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.   My first encounter with the writings of Fredric Jameson occurred when I was a graduate student in Comparative Literature. At that time the older, New Critical, T.S. Eliot-ized curriculum was […]

Renate Holub Massachusettes Institute of Technology <rholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>   Norris, Christopher. Spinoza & the Origins of Modern Critical Theory. Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1991.   For those readers familiar with Christopher Norris’s intellectual trajectory, his most recent publication, dealing with Baruch Spinoza, a major seventeenth century exegete of Descartes and a contemporary of Locke and Puffendorf, of […]

Sharon Bassett Department of English California State University-Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90032   Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Albany: SUNY UP, 1986;   Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987;   Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind. Albany: SUNY UP, 1990.   Comedy […]

Robert C. Holub Department of German University of California Berkeley <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>   Clayton Koelb, ed. Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Albany: SUNY P, 1990.   Since his death in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche has been associated with almost every major movement in the twentieth century. No other writer has succeeded as well as Nietzsche […]

Robert C. Holub Department of German University of California-Berkeley <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>   Norris, Christopher. What’s Wrong With Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.   From the outset two features of the title of Christopher Norris’s latest book need clarification. First, it is not insignificant that, despite the possibility of […]

John Batali Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California-San Diego <Batali@cogsci.ucsd.edu>   Nye, Andrea. Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic. London: Routledge. 1990.   Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1990.   Andrea Nye begins her “reading” of the history of logic by recounting how […]

Susan Ross Department of Speech Communication Pennsylvania State University <sxr5@psuvm>   Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: U California P, 1990.   In the opening chapter of her book, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Jane Flax states that “the conversational form of the […]

Rose Norman Department of English University of Alabama-Huntsville <rnorman@uahvax1>   Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.   When it comes to “knowing,” does it matter who does the knowing? Is knowing independent of the knower, and if not, what is it about the knower […]

Douglas A. Davis Department of English Haverford College <D_Davis@Hvrford>   Cixous, Helene. “Coming to writing” and other essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.   We have learned from Freud (who found the lesson hard to keep in mind) that if one would read […]

Clifford L. Staples Department of Sociology University of North Dakota <ud153289@ndsuvm1>   hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990.   About two years ago my friend Mike sent me bell hooks’s review of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” which was published in Zeta Magazine.1 Mike’s photocopy budget is even […]

Chris Connery Department of Chinese Literature University of California-Santa Cruz <Chris_Connery@FACULTY.UCSC.edu>   Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.   British Prime Minister John Major went to Beijing in the summer of 1991 to talk with China’s leaders about Hong Kong–duty-free port, […]

Roger Berger Department of English Witchita State University <Berger@twsuvm>   Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Calgary: U Calgary P, 1990.   In a recent review in Transition 53 of Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, Benita Parry distinguishes two methodologies–the post-colonial and […]