POSTMODERN CULTURE

      Volume 11, Number1 September, 2000 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.   Publication Announcements Web Guide to Complex Systems The Robot […]

Sheli Ayers Department of English University of California at Santa Barbara sayers@calarts.edu   Review of: Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.   In his New York Times review, Daniel Mendelsohn calls Glamorama “a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped book” full of vacuous characters “who talk to one another and about themselves in […]

David Banash Department of English University of Iowa david-banash@uiowa.edu   Review of: Survivor and Big Brother. CBS, 2000.   Andy Warhol once said that the perfect picture would be “one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous” (qtd. in Pratt 269). It seems that the invention of inexpensive web-based telecasting technologies […]

Michael Sinding Department of English McMaster University sindinm@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca   George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.   This audacious project based in cognitive linguistics began its career as a tentative collaboration between a linguist and a philosopher, with Metaphors […]

Andrew Hoberek Department of English University of Missouri-Columbia hobereka@missouri.edu   Review of: Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998, and Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.   At first glance, nothing seems less postmodern than southern literature, a body of writing simultaneously […]

Jason B. Jones Department of English Emory University jbjones@emory.edu   Review of: Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.   The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole […]

Richard Kaye Department of English Hunter College, CUNY RKaye43645@aol.com   Review of: Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.   When former Republican senator and one-time presidential aspirant Robert Dole appeared on television last year extolling the benefits of the […]

Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip Department of English University of Florida tharpold@english.ufl.edu   Just So Stories   Three hundred million souls,… swarming on the body of India, like so many worms on a rotten, stinking carcase,–this is the picture concerning us, which naturally presents itself to the English official!   –Swami Vivekananda, East and West […]

Mark Hansen English Department Princeton University mbhansen@princeton.edu   As several recent critical studies have conclusively demonstrated, biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.1 From his early major work culminating in Difference and Repetition of 1968, through his collaboration with Félix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (especially, A Thousand Plateaus […]

Nicola Pitchford English Department Fordham University pitchford@fordham.edu   Pastiche is central to the resistant politics of Kathy Acker’s writing–yet she would appear to agree with Fredric Jameson’s influential critique of pastiche as “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (17). Her 1986 novel Don Quixote is all about having to speak […]

Daniel Punday Department of English and Philosophy Purdue University Calumet pundaydj@axp.calumet.purdue.edu   “It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.”   —Of Grammatology   In the wake of deconstruction, critics have sought some way to reconcile poststructural textual […]

Paul Youngquist Department of English Penn State University pby1@psu.edu   When I heard the crash on the hiway I knew what it was from the start I went down to the scene of destruction And a picture was stamped on my heart.   I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother, I didn’t hear nobody pray; […]

      12.1 September, 2001 Every issue of Postmodern Culturecarries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.   Publication Announcements glosszine.org Text–Special Issue 2 Guy Debord’s The Society of […]

Jeffrey Insko Department of English University of Massachusetts, Amherst jinsko@english.umass.edu   Review of: And God Created Great Whales.Conceived and Composed by Rinde Eckert. Performed by Rinde Eckert and Nora Cole. Directed by David Schweizer. The Culture Project at 45 Bleecker, New York, NY. 9 September 2000.   There’s a clever irony in the very premise […]

Piotr Gwiazda English Department University of Miami, Coral Gables pgwiazda@mail.as.miami.edu   Review of: “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Special Exhibition at the New York Public Library. October 2000-January 2001. Exhibition website: <http://www.nypl.org/utopia>.   A few years ago, I told an English professor (who regularly teaches Thomas More’s Utopia in […]

David Banash Department of English University of Iowa david-banash@uiowa.edu   Review of: Traffic. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid. USA Films, 2000. Blow.Dir. Ted Demme. Perf. Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta. New Line Cinema, 2001.   Just as the intoxicating sensations of different drugs are […]

Jerzy O. Jura Foreign Languages and Literatures Iowa State University GeorgeOJ@aol.com   Review of: James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity.New York and London: Routledge, 1999.   The Tempest (La tempestad), a 1997 best-selling Spanish novel by Juan Manuel de Prada, not only borrows its title from the […]

Srdjan Smajic English Department Tulane University ssmajic@tulane.edu   Review of: Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events.Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.   Those who are familiar with Paul Virilio’s work on dromology, or the logic and effects of speed, may have noticed by now a paradox in the manner in which he addresses […]