POSTMODERN CULTURE

Cathy Caruth Department of Comparative Literature Emory University ccaruth@emory.edu   Jean Laplanche has long been recognized as a leading French thinker and psychoanalyst. His pioneering work on Freud’s early writing first revealed the temporal structure of trauma in Freud and its significance for Freud’s notion of sexuality. In his later work, Laplanche has elaborated on […]

Petar Ramadanovic Department of English University of New Hampshire petarr@cisunix.unh.edu Part I: Active Forgetting Introduction   In the second of his untimely meditations, Nietzsche suggests that a cow lives without boredom and pain, because it does not remember.1 Because it has no past, the cow is happy. But the animal cannot confirm its happiness precisely […]

David Farrell Krell Department of Philosophy DePaul University dkrell@wppost.depaul.edu   Here is the primal source of bitterness intrinsic in all life. Indeed, there must be bitterness. It must irrupt immediately, as soon life is no longer sweetened. For love itself is compelled toward hate. In hate, the tranquil, gentle spirit can achieve no effects, but […]

Petar Ramadanovic Department of English University of New Hampshire petarr@cisunix.unh.edu   The development of theory in America is marked by what has come to be known in the last ten years as trauma, and our purpose in this introduction is to point to that, and to open our collection with and to the question: What […]

      12.2 January, 2002 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.   Publication Announcements […]

Andreas Kitzmann Institute for Culture and Communication University of Karlstad, Sweden andreas.kitzmann@kau.se   Review of: Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.   Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media confirms a familiar suspicion. There is something lurking within the electronic devices that surround us: something more than just organized […]

Niran Abbas Department of Digital Media Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds niranabbas@hotmail.com   Review of: Maria Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time. SUNY Press, 1999.   Michel Serres is one of the few philosophers who can genuinely lay claim to the title of “specialist generalist” (Dale and Adamson). He […]

Jason B. Jones School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology jason.jones@lcc.gatech.edu   Review of: Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000.   In an interview familiar to English readers, “The Confession of the Flesh,” there is a terse exchange […]

Alexander H. Pitofsky Department of English Appalachian State University pitofskyah@appstate.edu   Review of: Joseph T. Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. New York: Random House, 2002.   In this cogent, wide-ranging study, Joseph Hallinan examines the ways in which the American penal system has been transformed during the last twenty years. […]

Christopher Pizzino Department of Literatures in English Rutgers University pizzino@fas-english.rutgers.edu   Review of: Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? New York: Verso, 2000.   In one of the more arresting moments in The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zizek connects the Pauline concept of agape, commonly known as Christian […]

Lisa Hopkins School of Cultural Studies Sheffield Hallam University L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk   Review of: The Mummy Returns.Dir. Stephen Sommers. Perf. Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo. MCA/Universal, 2002.   On her arrival at a pre-election Conservative Party rally at the Plymouth Pavilion in May 2002, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked a rare joke. […]

Matthew Hart Department of English University of Pennsylvania matthart@english.upenn.edu   Review of: Irvine Welsh, Glue.New York: Norton, 2002.   There’s a passage in Bill Buford’s celebrated account of football violence, Among the Thugs, that is relevant to the question of Irvine Welsh’s Scottishness. Buford is on the Italian island of Sardinia, amidst a rioting crowd […]

By Thomas Swiss and Seb Chevrel     ENTER: The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce Author’s Note  

Jim Hicks English and Comparative Literature Smith College james@transpan.it       Figure 1 “What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities?”   — Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts   In order to begin, I’ll have to confess: what follows here will be an essay in the early sense of […]

Brian Donahue Department of English Gonzaga University donahue@gonzaga.edu   This essay begins in the midst of the ongoing dilemma posed by late-capitalist society and postmodern culture, namely, whether these remain the ultimate horizon of the contemporary world and whether efforts to resist, oppose, represent critically, or propose alternatives to the “cultural dominant” of postmodernism are […]

Samir Dayal English Department Bentley College sdayal@bentley.edu Introduction: What Does the Woman Want?   The release of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) was almost an epochal event. It arrived to mark the zenith of a phase of extraordinary creativity in Australian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s with films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, […]