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) _AXE: E-mail Newsletter 2) _The Centennial Review_ 3) […]

    RE: Foley’s Review of Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. An Exchange between Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau and Michael W. Foley.   Dear PMC,   In a post-modern frame of reference one authors a book and then sets it free to be interpreted by various readers each in his or her own way. Criticism is central […]

Glen Scott Allen English Department Towson State University e7e4all@toe.towson.edu   Derrida, Jacques. Cinders. Tr. Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.   Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.   I. Burials Past & Faster   “The true wretchedness . […]

Josephine Lee Department of English Smith College jolee@smith   Case, Sue-Ellen, and Janelle Reinelt, eds. The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.   Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph R. Roach, eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.   One can clearly […]

James Morrison Department of English North Carolina State University   Kapsis, Robert E. Hitchock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.   After more than twenty years, if we date its inception at the publication of Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965), the Hitchcock industry is still burgeoning. On and on they […]

Susan J. Ritchie English Department Ohio State University sritchie@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu   Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.   Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective is a marvelously ambitious rereading of Caribbean literature, letters, and culture, deftly translated here by James Maraniss. But […]

Philip E. Agre Department of Communication University of California, San Diego pagre@ucsd.edu   Wright, Will. Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.   Attend any public hearing about a local environmental controversy, and almost the first thing you’ll notice is a clash of contrasting discourses. […]

Jon Thompson Department of English North Carolina State University   Celeste Olalquiaga. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.   Even while proclaiming an interest in the vast and gaudy landscape of kitsch rejected by high culture, a good deal of postmodern criticism remains highly theoretical, committed to analyzing written texts and […]

Stuart Moulthrop School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology sm51@prism.gatech.edu   Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. Bantam Spectra, 1992. 440 pp. $10.00 paperbound.   Late in his critique of the cyberpunk vogue, Andrew Ross turns his attention to what may be its ultimate expression–Cyberpunk: the Role-Playing Game. Here, he suggests, we may find […]

Honoria honoria@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu   Hubener: Karen Elliot is the founder of Plagiarism and the 1990-1993 Art Strike. Crackerjack Kid has been active in mail art since 1978 and is the editor of Eternal Network, an illustrated mail art anthology scheduled for publication in 1993 by University of Calgary Press. Honoria, a.k.a. Mail Art Kisses for Peace, […]

Kathleen Burnett Communication, Information & Library Studies Rutgers University burnet@zodiac.rutgers.edu   While the study of the temporal and spatial distanciation of communication is important to the concept of the mode of information the heart of the matter lies elsewhere. For the issue of communicational efficiency . . . does not raise the basic question of […]

Alan Aycock Department of Anthropology University of Lethbridge aycock@hg.uleth.ca   Jacques Derrida is a notably “playful” scholar, in two senses of the term. First, his writing style is playful, richly replete with the puns, circumambulations, excurses, hesitations, and gnomic recursions that make him a bane to his translators and a delight to his readers. Second, […]

Wendy Wahl Department of English University of Vermont w_wahl@uvmvax.bitnet   High technology networks make possible the deluge of texts surrounding us. We swim in the flow of information, and are provided with (or drowned within) interpretations and representations. High technology has changed the way capital functions, and makes possible the electronic format of this journal. […]

Vladislav Todorov Department of Slavic Languages University of Pennsylvania vtodorov@sas.upenn.edu   The explorers of Luxembourg usually designate its four stages according to the four possible etymologies of its name. The first three: the Luminous one, the Dissipated one, and the Twisted one stem from the Latin: Lux, Luxuriosus, Luxus. The fourth is usually derived from […]

Mikhail Epstein Department of Slavic Languages Emory University   I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the Western one. The paper was presented at the MLA conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie Perloff’s and Barrett Watten’s papers now proposed for […]

Marjorie Perloff Stanford University 0004221898@mcimail.com   In the wake, first of perestroika, and now of the wholesale dissolution of the Soviet Union, the temptation has been great to align the “new Russian poetry” with its American postmodernist counterpart. And since the poets who have taken the most active role in translating this hitherto samizdat poetry […]

    Symposiasts:   Jerome McGann, Department of English, University of Virginia (jjm2f@lizzie.engl.Virginia.EDU) Vitaly Chernetsky, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, St. Petersburg, Russia (atd@HM.SPB.SU) Mikhail Epstein, Department of Slavic Languages, Emory University Lyn Hejinian, (70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM) Bob Perelman, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania (bperelme@SAS.UPENN.EDU) Marjorie Perloff, Department of English, Stanford University (0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM) […]

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko St. Petersburg, Russia atd@HM.SPB.SU   Habits of mind result from a redistribution of the places on which the eyes fall. Yes, I’m probably right about this. What I’m thinking about at this particular moment allows me to assume so. A rusty rat crossing the street. A soft, interminable twilight, and above it the […]

Barrett Watten University of California, San Diego   While it has often been said that since the purported “fall of communism” the Soviet Union has become in reality a collection of Third World countries with nuclear weapons and a subway system, this is an untruth. It is the “Second World”–and what is that?   (Watten, […]