POSTMODERN CULTURE

Christopher Forster English Department University of Virginia csf2g@virginia.edu   Review of: Rodolphe Gasché. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.   When poststructuralists return to “classics” of Western philosophy, it is often in a spirit of revision. When Lacan turns his attention to Kant, it is to insist, against prevailing wisdom, […]

Mark A. Cohen French Department Sarah Lawrence College mcohen@slc.edu   Review of: Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.   The Book to Come was published in 1959 and is composed entirely of articles written for the Chroniques section of the Nouvelle Revue Française between 1953 and 1958.1 It […]

Philip A. Gunderson English Department San Diego Miramar College pgunders73@hotmail.com   Review of: Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), The Grey Album, Bootleg Recording   Depending on one’s perspective, Danger Mouse’s (Brian Burton’s) Grey Album represents a highpoint or a nadir in the state of the recording arts in 2004. From the perspective of music fans and […]

Andrew Timms Department of Music University of Bristol A.Timms@bristol.ac.uk   Review of: Helmling, Steven. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique.Albany: SUNY P, 2001.   While Fredric Jameson’s status as Marxism’s leading theorist of postmodernity is secure–and his influence on many arts and humanities disciplines undeniable–his work, […]

V. Nicholas LoLordo Department of English University of Nevada at Las Vegas lolordov@unlv.nevada.edu   Review of: Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2003.     Authors are the sentimental background of literature.   –Laura (Riding) Jackson   poets are retreating into–or […]

Stephen Dougherty Fine Arts and Humanities Division Elizabethtown Community and Technical College stephen.dougherty@kctcs.edu   Review of: Tabbi, Joseph, Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.   Cognitive Fictions is a sophisticated and fascinating book that asks difficult questions about the place of literature and the literary artist in the age of digitized mass media. […]

Gerald Gaylard Department of English University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa geraldgaylard@languages.wits.ac.za   Our entire linear and accumulative culture would collapse if we could not stockpile the past in plain view.   –Jean Baudrillard, Simulations 19   The standard spin given to digital virtuality in our era, and not just by advertising copywriters, is that […]

Rimi Khan School of Media Communication and Culture Murdoch University, Western Australia rimikhan@hotmail.com   Because there is commonly such a buzz of contradictory comment going on around him–as his friends and enemies push him to the left, right, and centre or sometimes off the political spectrum altogether–Foucault could assert that it proves what he contends: […]

Jenny H. Edbauer Department of English University of Texas at Austin edbauer@mail.utexas.edu   If there were no escape, no excess, no remainder, . . . the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect.   –Brian […]

Claire Colebrook Department of English Literature University of Edinburgh Claire.Colebrook@ed.ac.uk   The relation between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as […]

Arkady Plotnitsky Theory and Cultural Studies Program Department of English Purdue University aplotnit@sla.purdue.edu   With the death of Jacques Derrida, the world has lost one of its greatest philosophers, as well as one of the most controversial and misunderstood. But then, controversy and misunderstanding are part and parcel of philosophical greatness. Plato is still controversial […]

Andrew Saldino Department of Philosophy and Religion Clemson University asaldin@clemson.edu   Review of: Mark C. Taylor. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.   In Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption, Mark C. Taylor turns his attention to the topic of money […]

David Caplan Department of English Ohio Wesleyan University dmcaplan@owu.edu   A response to Lori Emerson, Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the Book: A Digital Poetics   As I write this response on my office computer, three uneven stacks of books threaten to tumble across my desk. On top of the piles perch Jack Spicer’s The Collected […]

Lori Emerson Department of English State University of New York, Buffalo lemerson@buffalo.edu   Review of: Loss Glazier. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2003.   There is no single epigraph that can suitably frame this review of Loss Glazier’s Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Loss Glazier’s 2003 collection of poetry is simply too variable, straddling […]