POSTMODERN CULTURE

  Krister Friday English Department Michigan State University kfriday@msu.edu   There is a brief but suggestive moment in Chuck Palahiuk’s popular novel, Fight Club, in which the first-person, unnamed narrator describes how Tyler Durden splices tiny pornographic frames into film reels. In the scene (dramatized in David Fincher’s largely faithful cinematic adaptation of the novel), […]

Philip Metres Department of English John Carroll University pmetres@jcu.edu      More than a decade has passed since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a war that offered up an “instant history” that effaced the histories of colonialism and empire in the Middle East, thanks to saturation media coverage that covered up far more than it […]

Julie Hayes Department of Modern Languages and Literatures University of Richmond jhayes@richmond.edu Editor’s Note: For the original French versions of selected quotations, please mouse over or click on the ¤ symbol.       “Lire, écrire, affaire de tact” J-L Nancy   In the summer of 1999, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote to the artist Simon Hantaï […]

Temenuga Trifonova Film Studies University of California, San Diego ttrifonova@UCSD.Edu   The discourse of materiality or objective reality today is, first of all, a discourse of ethics. Objective reality is either treated as a victim that has been wronged by subjectivity (the latter must, therefore, be brought to justice) or is regarded as “fearful,” “fatal,” […]

Michael Truscello Department of English University of Waterloo novel_t@rogers.com Introduction   The traces of power in the network society are equally located in the architecture of bricks and mortar and the architecture of information, the discursive practices that constitute the coding of network topologies. This paper examines the discourse of computer programming through Eric Raymond’s […]

      Volume 14, Number 3 May, 2004 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. […]

Saul Newman Department of Political Science University of Western Australia snewman@cyllene.uwa.edu.au   I am grateful to Caleb Smith for his response to my essay “Stirner and Foucault: Towards a Post-Kantian Freedom,” and I particularly like the way he links my discussion of a post-Kantian freedom to strategies of resistance against contemporary forms of incarceration. Already, […]

Caleb Smith Department of English Duke University cjs5@duke.edu   In a recent essay on “Stirner and Foucault,” Saul Newman brings these “two thinkers not often examined together” into a conversation about freedom, coercion, and individual subjectivity. Newman uses Stirner and Foucault to explore a discourse of freedom formulated by Kant and dominant since the Enlightenment, […]

David Alvarez Department of English Grand Valley State University alvarezd@gvsu.edu   Review of: Ben Highmore, ed., The Everyday Life Reader.London: Routledge, 2002.   Perhaps it is one of the symptoms of our theory-saturated, post-everything moment that everyday life has recently become not just an object of cultural analysis, but a crucial interpretive category in its […]

Andy Weaver Department of English University of Alberta aweaver@ualberta.ca   Review of: David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.   Agree or disagree with his aesthetics, his ideas, or his politics, no one seriously engaged in studying the arts of the twentieth […]

Michael S. Martin English Department Temple University msmartin@temple.edu   Review of: Emory Elliott, Louis Fretas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, eds., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age.New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.   “Let us, for example, credit it to the honor of Kant that he should expatiate on the peculiar properties of the sense of […]

Stuart Kendall stuartkendall@kanandesign.com   Review of: Clayton Eshleman, Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld.Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.   Section five of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy ends with a curious figure, a “weird image from a fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself […] […]

Gillian B. Pierce Department of Foreign Languages Ashland University gpierce@ashland.edu   Review of: Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics. Trans. David Harvey. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. (Originally published in French under the title Chambre Sourde: L’Antiesthétique de Malraux.Paris: Editions Galilée, 1998.)   Soundproof Room, the final completed work by the cultural philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, […]

Robert Payne School of Humanities University of Western Sydney r.j.payne@uws.edu.au   In April 2002, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its ruling of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, a case in which a certain semantic specificity seemed ultimately to take precedence over the moral and emotional imperatives that propelled the central argument […]

  Pelagia Goulimari Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities goulimari@angelaki1.demon.co.uk   The vast postmodernism debate, whose expansive and canonical phase spanned from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s but which has yet to reach a point of settlement or closure, engages with a multiplicity of questions, among which “what is postmodernism?” is not necessarily the […]

Jason B. Jones Department of English Central Connecticut State University jonesjason1@ccsu.edu   In his seminar of 1966-67 on the logic of fantasy, Jacques Lacan reported to his audience that he had recently been asked what need, what exigency drove him to theorize the objet a as object/cause of desire. According to the transcripts of this […]

Anustup Basu Department of English University of Pittsburgh anbst42@pitt.edu   Toward the beginning of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel El Otono del Patriarca, the protagonist, who is the dictator of an imaginary Latin American republic, is seen to witness his own funeral. That is, he sees himself being buried de facto, in terms of an ordering […]