POSTMODERN CULTURE

Alec McHoul Media Communication and Culture Murdoch University mchoul@central.murdoch.edu.au “Norbert’s Crossing” ©1997, Alec McHoul   It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks. I do not know.   –Norbert Wiener, 1947 (27) Steed: I’m playing it as a journalist, […]

Bishnupriya Ghosh Department of English Utah State University bishnu@cc.usu.edu   What seems an eternity ago, Kwame Appiah argued that the “post” in post-colonial was a theoretical space-clearing gesture.1 His critique of the use of neotraditional artifacts in a globalized late capitalist economy has been addressed, extended, and reframed by almost all major postcolonial critics from […]

Lisa Brawley Stuart Moulthrop Co-editors   With this first issue of volume nine, we introduce a new section of Postmodern Culture expressly addressed to the relay between new media technologies and cultural practice. We’ve called this section “Traffic.” To be sure, the intersection of technology, media, and cultural theory remains a central concern of the […]

David Banash Department of English The University of Iowa dbanash@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu   The Blair Witch Project.Dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Perf. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams. Artisan Entertainment, 1999.   Given its preposterously low budget, outsider production, and a priori cult status as ludic masterpiece, The Blair Witch Project does not seem […]

Donald F. Theall Department of Cultural Studies Trent University dtheall@trentu.ca   Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich. Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde, NSW: A 21*C Book published by Interface, 1998.   What might more properly be referred to by a more prosaic term such as “the digimediatrix” or “the digi-infomatrix” has through the […]

Michael Alexander Chaney Department of English Indiana University, Bloomington maxchi@aol.com   Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.   Academic Keywords is that rare sort of polemic that consoles with humor as it enrages us with personal accounts and persuasive analysis of the […]

H. Kassia Fleisher kass.fleisher@colorado.edu   Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian.New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.   The week I sit down to read Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian (which Yale UP plans to re-issue in paperback in September), President Clinton takes a “poverty tour.” He stops in rural areas of Kentucky’s Appalachia and Mississippi’s Delta, as […]

Mark Sanders Department of English and American Literature Brandeis University Society for the Humanities Cornell University ms248@cornell.edu   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.   Marx could hold The Science of Logic and the Blue Books together; but that was still only […]

Claudia Sadowski-Smith Department of American Thought and Language Michigan State University cssmith@msu.edu   Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.   Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital.Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.   Duke University Press’s recent publication of […]

  Marcel O’Gorman Director Foreign Language Instructional Technology Environment Tulane University ogorman@tcs.tulane.edu   Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays.Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997.   Brigadier Whitehead, a veteran of World War II, is taping his heroic adventures at the “Battle of Palermo” on a reel-to-reel, portable tape recorder. Roving about the cluttered room, he speaks […]

Patrick McGee Department of English Louisiana State University pmcgee@gateway.net   Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.   –Walter Benjamin, “The […]

Patrick McGee Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finnegan@uiuc.edu   Media and commerce do not just cover but help construct music subcultures…. Subcultural capital is itself, in no small sense, a phenomenon of the media.   –Sarah Thornton, “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave”   If you only talk to people who […]

Joe Amato Department of English University of Colorado at Boulder joe.amato@colorado.edu I.   Imagine: Once upon a time, I left the corporate world to join the academic world, thinking the lofty latter would tower above the corruption of corporate complicity.   Yup. I really thought that. Imagine.   Picture this: you’re seated at a table […]

Krzysztof Ziarek Department of English University of Notre Dame Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu   In Écrits Lacan remarks: “Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because his task is to act in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of […]

Carol Loranger English Department Wright State University carol.loranger@wright.edu   William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch appears “by wide public agreement” whenever lists of postmodern texts in English are compiled (Connor 129). Its status as a work of art seems clear. But its textual status is less clear: as yet, no effort has been made to establish […]

    New Co-Editor With this issue, PMC welcomes Jim English, who joins Lisa Brawley as co-editor of the journal. This welcome is more properly a welcome back, as Jim served as review editor from the journal’s founding to 1996. Paula Geyh, who succeeded Jim in that role, will continue to oversee the review section. […]