Monthly Archives: September 2013

      The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular email or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.     PMC Reader’s Report on Valerie Fulton, “An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark Twain and Star Trek’s Imperial Subject”:   […]

Ivan Strenski University of California, Santa Barbara eui9ias@mvs.oac.ucla.edu   Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.   Intellectual historian-cum-literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has given us a series of thoughtful essays on a cluster of issues of wide current concern: ethnocentrism, humanism, scientism, racism, nationalism, universalism, cultural relativism, exoticism, and […]

Tom Benson Pennsylvania State University t3b@psuvm.psu.edu   Cramer, Richard Ben. What It Takes: The Way to the White House. New York: Random House, 1992.   Richard Ben Cramer’s stated aim is to write an account of the 1988 presidential campaign that answers the questions of   What kind of life would lead a man (in […]

Myles Breen School of Communication Charles Stuart University Bathurst, Australia mbreen@csu.edu.au   Buck, Elizabeth. Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai’i. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.   Here is a book which commands attention from many audiences. It addresses that most important question facing postmodern cultural studies: the question of the survival […]

Rebecca Chung University of Chicago rmc2@quads.uchicago.edu   Mann, Patricia. Micropolitics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.   Micropolitics argues that shifting gender roles help produce postmodern anxiety. According to author Patricia Mann, scholars have overlooked the importance of shifting gender roles to help explain the postmodern condition: “I formulated this […]

Wendy Anson     The “10th Annual International Conference and Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM.” March, 1995. Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA.   The crowds, some like sheep, run here, run there. One man start, one thousand follow. Nobody can see anything, nobody can do anything. All rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, […]

Mark Poster University of California, Irvine mposter@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu   Steven Jones, ed., Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. New York: Sage, 1995.   This collection of essays is the first volume I have seen that studies empirically and in their wide variety computer-mediated modes of communication in relation to the question of community. The two other books […]

Tatjana Pavlovic Romance Languages Deparment University of Washington pavlovic@u.washington.edu   Ugresic, Dubravka. Fording the Stream of Consciousness. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.   Ugresic, Debravka. In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.   I envy the ‘Western writer.’ I envision my colleague the Western writer as an elegant passenger […]

Jeffrey Cass Texas A & M International University Jeffreycass@delphi.com   On the seventh day, the Lord said: “I’m pooped. You build the theme park.”   –Advertisement for Theme Park   The creators and advertisers of Theme Park (a CD-Rom based computer game, available in IBM and MacIntosh formats) promise potential consumers much in their simulations: […]

Paul Mann Department of English Pomona College     Zone   Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, collèges and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid […]

  Elisabeth Frost Department of English Dickinson College frost@dickinson.edu   How can one be a ‘woman’ and be in the street? That is, be out in public, be public–and still more tellingly, do so in the mode of speech.   –Luce Irigaray1   A 1984 anthology of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group of poets included a section […]

James Berger Department of English George Mason University jberger@osf1.gmu.edu   Nostalgia has a bad reputation. It is said to entail an addiction to falsified, idealized images of the past. Nostalgic yearning, as David Lowenthal writes, “is the search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present” (21). The […]

Virginia Hooper     Invocation   Philosophical speculation and recent history alike had prepared the way for an understanding of the process by which, in times long past, the gods had been recruited from the ranks of mortal men.   — Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods   Anything that serves as a […]

Joseph Arsenault and Tony Brinkley University of Maine tony_brinkley.academic@admin.umead.maine.edu   The place where they lay, it has a name–it has none. They did not lie there.   Der Ort, wo sie lagen, er hat einen Namen–er hat keinen. Sie lagen nicht dort.   –Paul Celan, “The Straitening [Engführung]”   Part I   I(a). Saying   […]

      This poem originally appeared in SULFUR 34 (Spring 1994).   Audio clips are provided here in .au format and .wav format. Sound players are available from the Institute’s FTP site for AIX 3.25, Windows 3.1 and Macintosh.     –rail band– Another cut was on the box as we pulled in. Fall […]

Paul Naylor Department of English The University of Memphis pknaylor@msuvx1.memphis.edu   We are aware of the fact that the changes of our present history are the unseen moments of a massive transformation in civilization, which is the passage from the all-encompassing world of cultural Sameness, effectively imposed by the West, to a pattern of fragmented […]

Phoebe Sengers Literary and Cultural Theory / Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University   Institutionalization, October 11-18, 1991. What happened?   The week was bizarre, inexplicable, intense. The week had a story, the story of a breakdown, a story whose breakdown delineates the workings of the psychiatric machine. This machine, operating on a streaming in/out flow […]