POSTMODERN CULTURE

Jeff Bell Dept. of History and Government Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond FHG$2395@ALTAIR.SELU.EDU   Jonathan Beller has set forth an interesting and provocative account of the relationship between cinema and what he takes to be the condition for the possibility of cinema–i.e., capital. Beller draws upon many resources to support this thesis, from the film Barton […]

Christian L. Pyle Department of English University of Kentucky uk00028@ukpr.uky.edu   Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Studies in Popular Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994.   Although the “superhero” has been a staple of American mass media since the emergence of Superman in 1938, a definitive study of the genre has not […]

Kevin J.H. Dettmar Department of English Clemson University dkevin@clemson.edu   Barbara Kruger. Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. 251 pp. $19.95 (cloth), $10.95 (paper).   In some ways, Barbara Kruger’s photomontage texts–red-blocked captions slapped across black & white photographs which they ironically reinscribe, like ransom notes, holding those […]

Thomas Benson Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric Pennsylvania State University t3b@psuvm.psu.edu   Garry, Patrick M. Scrambling for Protection: The New Media and the First Amendment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.   The economy, the technology, and the regulatory infrastructure of communications are undergoing rapid change, with unpredictable but probably important social consequences. In […]

Jonathan Markovitz Department of Sociology University of California, San Diego jmarkovi@weber.ucsd.edu   La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. Organized by the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The exhibit will be on display at the San Jose Museum of Art from October through December […]

Jeffrey Nealon Department of English Pennsylvania State University jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu   Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York & London: Routledge, 1993.   Editor’s note: readers may also be interested in the PMC-MOO discussion of this book, archived here .   — JU   Judith Butler has certainly produced a […]

Russell A. Potter English Department Colby College rapotter@colby.edu   Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan UP/ UP of New England)   Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard UP)   The mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in the development of the cluster of intellectual and […]

Andrew Levy Department of English Butler University Levy@Butler.edu   Labor Day Weekend, 1984. Erik Huber signs a “drive-away” contract with a man from Queens to drive his car to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley in two weeks time. Erik then lets nine days lapse, packs his college belongings in the back of the car, […]

Lidia Yuknavitch nubin@gladstone.uoregon.edu   Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else’s property but because their life was “laborious,” devoted to bodily functions.   –Hannah Arendt   I talk to myself. When you are out of the room of the world, things speak to […]

Michael Evans mrevans@delphi.com   The Behavior of Bodies, the Motion of Clocks   An orbit is a way of keeping time– not a metaphor for life together with another life–a body and a body at odds with the room’s linear constraints. (The room itself is not a metaphor for how we live.) The bed does […]

James Boros jboros@ravenpress.com   In memory of Kurdt Cobain   (1) Apocalypse Then   It ended in an open shaftway, following LBJ’s example. By designating cauldron 19 as their sauce, mirages (against no odds) vented mighty grams of plenty, and cast visceral tracking smoke in henceforth unforeseen celebrations of danger. Without too much grinding, her […]

Charles Bernstein Dept. of English S.U.N.Y. Buffalo bernstei@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu   Soapy Water Claire-in-the-Building Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis   Audio clips here are in the .au format and were originally recorded at a reading by the author in Charlottesville, Virginia (September, 1994). Thanks to Pete Yadlowsky and HACK for conversion from analog to digital form. More […]

John Walker University of Toronto jwalker@epas.toronto.ca From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence–we have to create ourselves as a work of art.   -Michel Foucault Introduction/Apologia   The 1990s have to this point occasioned a new space, a new opportunity for those […]

Allan Stoekl Departments of French and Comparative Literature Pennsylvania State University   The postmodern moment has been characterized as one of the loss of legitimacy of the master narratives–social, historical, political; Hegelian, Marxist, Fascist–by which lives were ordered and sacrificed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1   The demise of the great story, which gave […]

Marie-Laure Ryan Dept. of English Colorado State University mmryan@vines.colostate.edu   Few of us have actually donned an HMD (head-mounted display) and DGs (data-gloves), and entered a computer-generated, three-dimensional landscape in which all of our wishes can be fulfilled: wishes such as experiencing an expansion of our physical and sensory powers; getting out of the body […]

Robert Kolker Department of English University of Maryland Robert_P_KOLKER@umail.umd.edu   Preface: “The Moving Image Reclaimed” is a twofold experiment. On the level of textuality, it is an attempt to write about films with moving-image examples present and available to be viewed, the way a paragraph from a novel or lines from a poem are available […]

Deepika Bahri School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu   Directing his “attention to the importance of two problems raised by Marxism and by anthropology concerning the moral and social significance of biological and physical ‘things,’” Michael Taussig argues in The Nervous System that “things such as the signs and symptoms […]