Monthly Archives: September 2013

James Berger is senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse and editor of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition. His current project, “The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity,” will be published by New York […]

Robert Wood (bio)University of California, Irvinewrobert@uci.edu Peter Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.    Peter Paik’s new book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, makes an interesting contribution to the growing study of science fiction. Paik continues […]

Kaplan Page Harris (bio)St. Bonaventure Universitykharris@sbu.edu Charles Bernstein, All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.    All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems offers the prospect of commemoration and erasure. The same is probably true of selected poems in general. The format serves the purpose of introduction and […]

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (bio)The State University of New York at Buffaloepziarek@buffalo.edu Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.    Andrew Benjamin’s book Of Jews and Animals is a welcome addition not only to the burgeoning field of animal studies but also to contemporary preoccupations with justice, universality, and particularity and the demands […]

Nathanaël (bio)     [ extract ]  § “Ways of dying also include crimes.”1 § I feel myself of another time, as though there were other time. § Side by side or superimposed, Paul Virilio’s Tilting bunker and Michal Rovner’s Outside #2 exacerbate – they reiterate – the time of decay : Rovner’s over-exposures2 bring to the […]

Judith Goldman (bio)University of Chicagojgoldman1@uchicago.edu    Nathanaël (formerly known as Nathalie Stephens) writes entre-genre, composes (and lives) betwixt genders, drafts in the non-space of in-commensurability between English and French, both her primary, improper tongues. Troubling borders separating disciplines, dividing countries, and distinguishing words, Nathanaël’s texts borrow meticulously and programmatically from other authors, literalizing the Barthesian […]

Heather J. Hicks (bio)Villanova Universityheather.hicks@villanova.edu Abstract David Mitchell’s experimental novel, Cloud Atlas, confronts the potentially apocalyptic effects of both linear and cyclical modes of temporality. Using as a framework Micea Eliade’s well-known philosophical treatise, The Myth of the Eternal Return, the essay demonstrates that Mitchell’s preoccupation with cyclical temporality can be understood as a reaction against […]

Marcel O’Gorman (bio)University of Waterloomarcel@uwaterloo.ca Abstract O’Gorman is particularly interested in the relationship between death and technology, an area of research that he has dubbed “necromedia.” This essay adopts Ernest Becker’s conception of culture as a “hero system” that fulfills two primary existential needs: 1) the denial of death, and 2) the desire for recognition. By […]

Jennifer Rhee (bio)Duke Universityjsr11@duke.edu Abstract   In popular culture and in artificial intelligence, the Turing test has been understood as a means to distinguish between human and machine. Through a discussion of Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2: A Novel, Joseph Weizenbaum’s computer program therapist ELIZA, and Emily Short’s interactive fiction Galatea, this essay argues that our […]

James Berger (bio)Yale UniversityJames.Berger@yale.edu    A bon mot of my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter: She was watching a video of The Nutcracker ballet, of which she’s a great fan, and she said, “There’s Drosselmeyer!”—that is, the mysterious, wizard-like friend of the family who brings the nutcracker doll and the other toys to life and who, in most […]

Michael R. Griffiths (bio)Rice Universitymrg1@rice.edu Abstract This essay analyzes the aesthetics of capitalist economics at the threshold of the transition from fordist to postfordist modes of production. The essay organizes this analysis around a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest. At stake is the relation between aesthetic productions which engage the […]