POSTMODERN CULTURE

      Volume 10, Number 2 January, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC. […]

David Schuermer Department of English University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale dschuer@wko.com   Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.   In reviewing Andrew Ross’s Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, I am reminded […]

Brad Lucas Department of English University of Nevada, Reno brad@unr.edu   Thomas Rosteck, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999.   The thirteen essays in Thomas Rosteck’s At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies discuss connections between the practices that constitute rhetorical studies and those that constitute cultural […]

Matthew Abraham Philosophy and Literature Program Purdue University MAbra68114@aol.com   Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Routledge, 1998.   Paul Cilliers’s Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems attempts to bring together developments in neuroscience, linguistics, logic, computer science, the philosophy of science, and poststructural theory in an effort to locate unifying themes […]

Jürgen Pieters Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory University of Ghent, Belgium jurgen.pieters@rug.ac.be   John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: MacMillan, 1998.   One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory–a field dominated since the early eighties by the so-called “historical turn”–has been […]

Nezih Erdogan Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture Bilkent University nezih@bilkent.edu.tr   Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism.London and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.   When feminist studies, as it developed in the Anglo-American world, turned to Third World countries, it produced a discourse which put an emphasis on the situation […]

Steven Helmling Department of English University of Delaware helmling@odin.english.udel.edu   Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method.London and New York: Verso, 1998.   Fredric Jameson’s oeuvre is daunting for almost every possible reason. Besides its sheer bulk, the difficulty of its themes, and its notoriously demanding prose style, there’s the vast scope of the cultural materials it […]

Stefan Mattessich Department of English Loyola Marymount University blzbub@msn.com   Eyes Wide Shut. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Perf. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack. Warner Brothers, 1999.   Such was the fashion, such the human being; the men were like the paintings of the day; society had taken […]

Tamise Van Pelt Department of English and Philosophy Idaho State University vantamis@isu.edu   As half of a signifying binary, the “Other” is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the […]

  Bernd Herzogenrath Bernd.Herzogenrath@post.rwth-aachen.de   Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic is always a bit silly. If one does not go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by innumerable examples…   –Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 209   Techno […]

George Dillon Department of English University of Washington dillon@u.washington.edu   We find ourselves–we with our various discourses–in the midst of a new medium. Which does not, of course, mean we are all experiencing the same thing. HTML hypertext seems to have about as much intrinsic character as tofu. It lends itself to many deployments; people […]

N. Katherine Hayles English Department University of California Los Angeles HAYLES@humnet.ucla.edu   Five hundred years of print have made the conventions of the book transparent to us.1 It takes something like Sol Lewitt’s Squares with the Sides and Corners Torn Off to bring into visibility again the convention of the page.2The pages display black squares, […]

Sianne Ngai Department of English and American Literature and Language Harvard University sngai@fas.harvard.edu   There is stupid being in every one. There is stupid being in every one in their living. Stupid being in one is often not stupid thinking or stupid acting. It very often is hard to know it in knowing any one. […]

      Volume 11, Number 2 January, 2001 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC. […]

Linda Belau Department of English George Washington University lbelau@gwu.edu   Perhaps the most mysterious and the most devastating dimension of trauma is its apparent power to confound ordinary forms of understanding. Trauma seems to belong to another world, beyond the limits of our understanding. Indeed, this is precisely the point of interest for the deconstructive […]

Ellie Ragland English Department University of Missouri ellie.ragland@prodigy.net   In recent literary studies of trauma, many critics postulate trauma as itself a limit on representation. In Shoshana Felman’s words, working with trauma in the literary classroom, whether through fiction, historical fiction, or poetry, has the pedagogical effect of “break[ing] the very framework of the class” […]