POSTMODERN CULTURE

    Editors’ note:   We received many letters addressing our move to Johns Hopkins University Press and to a subscription-based model of recovering our costs. That model in brief: with the January 1997 issue, PMC is published as part of Project Muse of Johns Hopkins University Press. The most current issue of PMC remains […]

Terry Harpold School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology terry.harpold@lcc.gatech.edu   David Cronenberg, Crash. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Unger, Rosanna Arquette. Fine Line Features, 1996.   The unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature.1 […]

Bill Freind Department of English University of Washington williamf@u.washington.edu   R.L. Burnside, A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey, Matador, 1996. Jon Spenser Blues Explosion, Now I Got Worry, Matador/Capitol, 1997.   Unlike almost every other form of contemporary music, blues thrives on tradition. While old school hip-hop, for example, refers to a style just over […]

  Robert Elliot Fox Department of English Southern Illinois University bfox@siu.edu   Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness. Ryko RCD, 1997.   The Beat Generation currently is enjoying what some might call a renaissance and others might think of as a resurrection–designations that could seem apt, given Jack Kerouac’s persistent and powerful sense of death always awaiting […]

Michael Witmore Department of Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley mwitmore@socrates.berkeley.edu   The New Erudition Ed. Randolph Starn. Spec. issue of Representations56 (1996): 1-143.   The title of the most recent special issue of Representations, “The New Erudition,” seems calculated to intrigue. Editor Randolph Starn recognizes the irony of the title in his introduction to this […]

Arkady Plotnitsky Literature Program Duke University aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu   Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Steven Hawking), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; with a glance back at The Emperor’s New Mind, Shadows of the Mind, and The Nature of Space and Time.   At 4 p.m. […]

Paul Trembath Department of English Colorado State University ptrembath@vines.colostate.edu   Paul Patton, Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.   A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it. –Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (4) [emphasis mine]   New “theoretical” horizons are starting to open up on […]

François Debrix Department of Political Science Purdue University debrix@polsci.purdue.edu   Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political. New York: Routledge, 1996, 174 pp.   The impact of Jacques Derrida’s thought on contemporary politics has often been treated as an accidental, at best marginal, phenomenon. Unlike other French thinkers representative of what is generally understood as the […]

Craig Saper Deparment of English University of Pennsylvania csaper@ccat.sas.upenn.edu   In the second half of the twentieth century, artists, writers, and printers started many alternative distribution networks for their experimental art and literature. They supplemented or ignored the gallery system with direct mailings and other innovative ways to reach their audiences and collaborators. During the […]

    Abstract: “Jumping to Occlusions” is perhaps the first thorough statement of a poetics of online space. In the present hypertextual trickster edition, a lively investigative language of the link is employed helping to develop this essay’s written argument through its own hypertextuality–its jumps, sidebars, graphics, embedded sound files, misleadings, and other features. This […]

    Abstract:Johanna Drucker’s cumulative work as a writer, printer, book artist, and scholar of visible language in all its forms has accumulated in a critical and creative corpus which is, as one observer has put it, nothing less than “a conceptual framework for the relationship between the visual arts and the written arts.” Nowhere […]

    Abstract: This collaborative document is a hypertextual reflection upon the politics of of sovereignty, self-hood, and community as they are embodied in three distinctive moments and formations of the social imaginary in Western capitalism: the emergence of linear perspective and the specular visual ordering of the social senses in Renaissance mercantile capitalism; the […]

John Cayley © 1997 PMC 7.3   Book Unbound*   Abstract: “Book Unbound” is a “collocational cybertext,” a self-assembling poetic collage that can be read in two ways: either automatically in the “bound” mode, or in an “unbound” mode that allows readers to extract and recycle words from its recombinant text stream. The present version […]

    Abstract: Alphaweb is a hypertext consisting of poetry and ruminations, graphics, and fragments of the Coriolis Codex, suggesting (but hardly conclusively) a special relationship between angels and dragons. The work has at least three interpenetrating structures, approximately 250 areas and three times that many doors and passageways. The structure that is always present […]

    Abstract:A drowning, a murder, a friendship, three or four love affairs, a boy and a girl, two girls and their mothers, two mothers and their lovers, a daughter and her father, a father and his lover, seven women, three men, twelve months, twelve threads, eight hours, eight waves, one river, a quilt, a […]

Stuart Moulthrop School of Communications Design University of Baltimore samoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu   Decorating the Corpse: Hypertext After the Web   Not long ago I learned that in 1997-98, two new literary prizes will be given for work in hypertext, one in the U.S. and one in Europe. When I reported this to a certain writer well […]