POSTMODERN CULTURE

    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) Denver Quarterly 2) DisClosure 3) _REACH_ […]

The Editors Eyal: Last year we expected that the essays we would publish –a good number of them anyway–would be affected by the electronic medium, but that has not happened much. Several of the essays do gain something from being in this medium–Ulmer’s or Moulthrop’s. In print they would lose at the very least the […]

M.E. Sokolik Texas A&M University <e305ms@tamvm1>   Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts, by David Murray. Indiana UP, 1991.   The Dictionary of Americanisms states that the phrase “forked tongue” is “used in imitation of Indian speech, to mean a lying tongue, a false tongue.” Thus, the choice of Forked […]

Greg Dawes North Carolina State University <gadfll@ncsuvm.bitnet>   Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, by John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990).   One of the major contributions to literary studies in recent years has been the recognition that political consciousness is invariably fused with aesthetic practice. In light […]

Jim English University of Pennsylvania <jenglish@pennsas>   Fredric Jameson, the key Marxist player in the “postmodernism debates” of the early and mid eighties, has now published an entire book on postmodern culture, titled after his classic 1984 article in New Left Review, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The recycled title may keep […]

John Anderson Northwestern University <jca@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>   The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991. 213 pp.   The essays in this collection offer different kinds of assistance to a reader trying to interpret the multiple versions of […]

Marcia Ian Rutgers University   Do muscles have gender, or are they, on the contrary, ungendered human meat? Other than the few muscles associated with their sexual organs, men and women have the same muscles. Does this make muscles neuter, or perhaps neutral? Is there some “difference” between the biceps of a male and those […]

Elizabeth A. Wheeler University of California, Berkeley   Cut #1: Mudanzas   When I hear the word “postmodernism” I see white people moving into the neighborhood and brown people having to move out.   My friend Tinkerbell from Tustin and I used to live in an apartment building wedged between a condominium and a tenement. […]

David Mikics University of Houston I. Ish and Ism   Ishmael Reed is a postmodern writer; he is also an African-American writer. The purpose of this essay is to reflect on the conjunction between these two roles in Reed’s work–and the somewhat surprising fact that they are in conjunction more than in conflict. Postmodernism, with […]

John R. Maier State University of New York, College at Brockport jmaier@brock1p   If, as Michel Foucault claims, “Western man” has become a “confessing animal” with a narrative literature appropriate to that role, does the Western author/confessor elicit from the cultural other a story that makes sense either to the priest or the patient? The […]

Stuart Moulthrop University of Texas at Austin <eifa307@utxvm.bitnet>   The original Xanadu (Coleridge’s) came billed as “a Vision in a Dream,” designated doubly unreal and thus easily aligned with our era of “operational simulation” where, strawberry fields, nothing is “real” in the first place since no place is really “first” (Baudrillard, Simulations 10). But all […]

Steven B. Katz North Carolina State University sbkeg@ncsuvm   A Computer File Named Alison   \For My Wife\   I dated a file named Alison, created worlds in her name; but needed more space, new memories to save, new files to live. (After all, although the universe expands at astronomic rates, it’s slowing down, and […]

David Porush Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute   David Porush responds to Allison Fraiberg’s essay, “Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions,” Postmodern Culturev.1 n.3 (May, 1991):   Allison Fraiberg uses the discourses of AIDS to read large oppositions and tendencies at work in our culture. As such, AIDS is one more battlefield between right thinking and wrong […]

Allison Fraiberg University of Washington fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu   We live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. . . . today, there is a whole pornography of information.   –Jean Baudrillard   [T]here has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not […]

Eugenio D. Matibag Iowa State University   Parce que nous vous haissons vous et votre raison, nous nous reclamons . . . du cannibalisme tenace.   –Aime Cesaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal   Howling words of fresh blood to spark the sacred fire of the world, Aime Cesaire in 1939 claimed kinship with […]