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) _Essays in Postmodern Culture_ 2) _Black Ice Books_ […]

Paul Miers Department of English Towson State University e7e4mie@toe.towson.edu   RE: Kip Canfield’s essay, “ The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky,” in PMC v.3 n.3. A reply by Paul Miers, Department of English, Towson State University.   Connectionism and Its Consequences   Kip Canfield’s article in the last issue of Postmodern […]

Timothy D. Taylor Music Department Denison University taylort@cc.denison.edu   Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.   Co-editors Kahn and White describe their purpose in The Wireless Imagination as an attempt to compile a collection of “first utterances” rather than a Last Word on […]

Marc Perlman Department of Music Tufts University perlman@pearl.tufts.edu   Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project. My Music. Foreword by George Lipsitz. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1993.   Cultural Studies frequently constructs popular music as a particularly disruptive sort of object, […]

Andrew Herman Department of Sociology Drake University ah7301r@acad.drake.edu   Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Televison and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.   I. Fear of Music: Postmodernism and Music Television   The first time I heard the terms “postmodernism” and “the postmodern” was at the “Marxism and Interpretation of […]

John McGowan Department of English University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill jpm@unc.bitnet   Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.   Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in October and Art […]

J.L. Lemke Sociology Department City University of New York jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu   Bourdieu, Pierre and Lois J.D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.   I. The Text   Invitation to Reflexive Sociology is a book that is not quite a text. Tiles in a genre mosaic abut one another: Fantasy […]

Heesok Chang Department of English Vassar College hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu   Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.   Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.   I. Philosophical Homelessness   Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from […]

Rita Barnard English Department University of Pennsylvania rbarnard@mail.sas.upenn.edu   Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Perspectives on South Africa 48. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.   Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.   David Attwell’s important […]

Mark Fenster Department of Telecommunications Indiana University fenster@silver.ucs.indiana.edu   Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.   Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.   “Best Evidence is […]

Steven Shaviro Department of English University of Washington shaviro@u.washington.edu   Burroughs writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” Good advice for the anatomically deranged, like Cliff Steele. He’s a character in the DC/Vertigo comic book […]

Martin Rosenberg Visiting Assistant Professor Department of English Texas A&M University mer1911@tamvm1.tamu.edu   [O]rators and others who are in variance are mutually experiencing something that is bound to befall those who engage in senseless rivalry: believing that they are expressing opposite views, they fail to perceive that the theory of the opposite party is inherent […]

Lynda Hart Department of English The University of Pennsylvania   In A Taste for Pain, Maria Marcus recounts an anecdote about a women’s studies conference in 1972. Germaine Greer, the keynote speaker, was interrupted by a young woman from the audience who suddenly cried out: “But how can we start a women’s movement when I […]

George Bradley     Another Autumn Refrain   He kept trying to get it right, trying to catch That wisp of melody, that snatch of sound, listening And trying, like a man playing music, practicing scales;   He kept trying to remember, though it would not come, About the leaves and the ghosts hung in […]

Elizabeth Fay Department of English University of Massachusetts at Boston EFAY@UMBSKY.CC.UMB.EDU   The term “the Byronic postmodern” is coined here specifically for the purpose of uncovering and exploring a congruency in the works of those artists invested in some aspect of the Byronic hero. The Byronic, which was both encoded by Byron and beyond his […]

Eugene W. Holland Department of French Language and Literature The Ohio State University eugeneh@humanities1.cohums.ohio-state.edu   Whether Deleuze and Guattari were actually “doing philosophy” in the Anti-Oedipus or not, their last collaborative work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) may shed some light on the status of the concepts operating in that early work.1 Unlike scientific concepts, which […]

Stephanie Hammer Department of Literature and Languages University of California, Riverside HAMM@ucrac2.ucr.edu The time is past when we can plant ourselves in front of a Vernet and sigh along with Diderot, “How beautiful, grand, varied, noble, wise, harmonious, rigorously colored this is!”   (Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)   What a wise and […]

Peter Hitchcock Department of English Baruch College, CUNY   Postmodern Culture Version1   it is noh mistri wi mekkin histri it is noh mistri wi winnin victri   (“Mekkin Histri” LKJ)   “The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means”   (The Satanic Verses, Salman […]