POSTMODERN CULTURE

      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 Kevin McNeilly, “Ugly Beauty: John Zorn and the Politics of Postmodern Music”   I think a […]

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Department of English University of Virginia mgk3k@faraday.clas.virginia.edu     Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.   It is tempting to begin by commenting on the fact that this review of the work of an author who is at best wary […]

Nickola Pazderic University of Washington nickola@u.washington.edu   Susan Jeffords. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 212 pp.   Peter Lehman. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. x, 237 pp.   In many ways the books of […]

Rob Wilkie Hofstra University rwilkie1@hofstra.edu   Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton. Theory as Resistance. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.   By opening up a field of inquiry into the production and reproduction of subjectivities, postmodern theory offered the potential to radically transform the object of literary studies. No longer would intellectual work in the Humanities […]

Steve Martinot Univ. of California at Berkeley marto@ocf.berkeley.edu     Jean-Luc Nancy. The Experience of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.   If there were a movie version of Jean-Luc Nancy’s book The Experience of Freedom, the scene would be a dark cabaret and dance hall. In it, the air is smoke-filled and murky, though […]

Kristine Butler University of Minnesota butle002@maroon.tc.umn.edu     Chantal Akerman. “Bordering on Fiction: Chatal Akerman’s D’Est.” Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota. June 18-August 27, 1995.   Chantal Akerman’s career as a filmmaker spans more than twenty-five years. Her cinematic oeuvre has explored and problematized theoretical questions of the visual and aural languages of cinema and […]

Tamise Van Pelt Idaho State University vantamis@fs.isu.edu   The Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology. June 21-24, 1995, Freiburg, Germany.   queer v. 1. To bring out the difference that is forced to pass under the sign of the same. 2. To require to speak from the position of the Other.   Postcards mailed […]

Crystal Bartolovich Literary and Cultural Studies Carnegie Mellon University crystal+@andrew.cmu.edu     Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds. Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation. Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1994.   Traffic (trae-fik), sb. . . . 1. The transportation of merchandise for the purpose of trade; hence, trade between distant or distinct communities.   […]

Rhonda Garelick Department of French and Italian University of Colorado at Boulder   The scene opens with diet guru Richard Simmons wearing old-fashioned driving goggles and an aviator scarf. He is driving a 1930’s style convertible roadster. Winking at the camera and his audience he tells us that he is on his way to pay […]

Charles Woodman and Scott Davenport     PLUNDER SQUAD is a twenty-minute video program by Charles Woodman and Scott Davenport   (IMAGE) (IMAGE) (IMAGE)   (3.5 MB Quicktime clip)   Date: Mon, 11 Sep 1995 16:59:49 -0400   A Self Defining Object        “Plunder Squad” is entirely constructed of appropriated elements from TV cop […]

Tony Thwaites Department of English University of Queensland tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.oz.au   Steven Helmling’s “Historicizing Derrida”1 reads Derrida’s writings, and particularly the huge corpus of other writings which have grown up around them, as lacking an essential “historically informed awareness” (1) which he proposes in part to supply.   A starting place, then, a place where two […]

Jeffrey T. Nealon Department of English The Pennsylvania State Unversity jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu     The metaphysical desire . . . desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness — the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it . . . . [Desire] nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger.   […]

Peter Consenstein Department of French Borough of Manhattan Community College pxcbm@cunyvm.cuny.edu   Although Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle — The Workshop for Potential Literature) does not want to be considered a literary school, or to overtly advance specific ideologies or theories, its goals portray an understanding of literature that merits outline and critique. Oulipo was […]

Daniel White and Gert Hellerich University of Central Florida University of Bremen postmod4u@aol.com   Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom   — Jacques Derrida, “Différance” (22).     NARRATOR (in peripatetic mode, a little paranoid about the possibility of being hit by a cabbage flying […]

Stephen Barker School of the Arts University of California-Irvine sfbarker@uci.edu   I. Parallax: Toward a Nietzschean Genealogy of the Paramodern Fragment   To attempt any genealogy, let alone a Nietzschean one, of the kind of fragment one confronts in Nietzsche, Derrida, Blanchot, and Beckett, and to do so within the context of the faux-postmodern,1 is […]

Stephanie Barbé Hammer Centers for Ideas and Society University of California – Riverside hamm@citrus.ucr.edu 1. can’t find a better man2   A feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and roll culture bandwagon, I grab the wheel and direct a critical detour from the wild and wooly trail mapped out by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces. I […]