POSTMODERN CULTURE

Derek Nystrom Department of English McGill University derek.nystrom@mcgill.ca   Review of: Sideways. Dir. Alexander Payne. Perf. Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh. Fox Searchlight, 2004.   In a moment that we are meant to take as a sign that its protagonist has hit rock bottom, Sideways (2004) puts failed novelist and wine […]

David Herman Department of English Ohio State University herman.145@osu.edu   Review of: Walter Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism.Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.   Ambitious in scope, richly integrative, and extensively researched, this study demonstrates its author’s familiarity with ideas from multiple fields of inquiry, including classical as well as modern rhetoric, […]

Jeffrey Williams English Department Carnegie Mellon University jwill@andrew.cmu.edu   Review essay: Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000) and Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).   If you are building a house, the first thing you do is probably not to plant flowers. You dig the basement, pour the foundation, frame the building, […]

Laura Hinton Department of English City College of New York laurahinton@earthlink.net   One of the most innovative and sometimes overlooked founding writers of the West Coast Language Poetry school is Carla Harryman, author of twelve books of poetry and cross-genre writing that includes poet’s-prose, plays, and experimental essays. Her short classic pieces in collections like […]

Ben Roberts Media Studies University of Bradford b.l.roberts@bradford.ac.uk Between Derrida and Stiegler   In his massive multi-volume work, Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler explores a history of technics as epiphylogenesis–the preservation in technical objects of epigenetic experience. Epiphylogenesis marks for Stiegler a break with genetic evolution (which cannot preserve the lessons of experience), a break […]

Dalia Judovitz Department of French and Italian Emory University djudovi@emory.edu   Besides, you know, all my work, literally and figuratively, fits into a valise . . . –Marcel Duchamp, 16 Dec. 1954   “Well, it had to come. How long will it last?” wondered Marcel Duchamp in a letter to Katherine Dreier about the onset […]

Ashley Dawson Department of English College of Staten Island, City University of New York adawson@gc.cuny.edu   In his classic study of post-1945 youth subcultures, Dick Hebdige suggests that Black British popular culture served as a template for defiant white working class subcultural practices and styles (29). The kind of affiliatory cultural politics that Hebdige describes […]

Timothy Donovan  English Department University of North Florida tdonovan@unf.edu skimball@unf.edu jlsmith@unf.edu   On 8 October 2004, Jacques Derrida died. We are now left with these remains. We write as mediums, like cane-tappers trying to record under the influence of a Derrida that remains within us and outside us.   As we write, we face the […]

D. Harlan Wilson Liberal Arts Wright State University, Lake Campus david.wilson@wright.edu   Review of: Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele’s The Surrogates. Issues 1-5. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006.   In the tradition of Blade Runner (1981), Akira (the early 1980s comics and film), Neuromancer (1984), Watchmen (1987), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Dark City (1998), […]

Jehanne-Marie Gavarini Art Department, University of Massachusetts Lowell Visiting Scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University gavarini@brandeis.edu   Review of: Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, In Search of Lost Theorem. Paris: Pompidou Center, 11 May-14 Aug 2006.   Voyage(s) en Utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006, In Search of Lost Theorem was presented at the Pompidou […]

Michael Mirabile English and Humanities Reed College michael.mirabile@reed.edu   Review of: Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History.Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.   History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History begins by expressing surprise at the various claims that fall under the rubric of […]

Theresa Smalec Performance Studies New York University tks201@nyu.edu   Review of: Marina Abramovic’s Seedbed. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 10 Nov. 2005.   For seven days last November, Marina Abramovic engaged in a seemingly simple art experiment. The Solomon R. Guggenheim’s program straightforwardly outlines her weeklong endeavor: “In Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic reenacts seminal […]

Bill Freind Department of English Rowan University freind@rowan.edu   Review of: Araki Yasusada’s Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters In English.Eds. Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez. Cumberland, RI: Combo, 2005.   While Foucault imagines a time in which questions of the “authenticity” and “originality” of the author would […]

      Read an introduction to these videos written by Viet Thanh Nguyen.   View Flash streaming video of The Past is a Distant Colony | Explosions in the Sky   View Quicktime movie of Explosions in the Sky   View Quicktime movie of The Past is a Distant Colony   University of California, […]

Karen L. Kopelson Department of English University of Louisville karen.kopelson@louisville.edu   What exactly is morally objectionable about excess?   –Stuart Walton, Out of It   By Way of (an Excessive) Introduction   In the introduction to The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo writes that feminism has often “stood for and with the normal”; that in efforts […]

Melinda Cooper Global Biopolitics Research Group Institute of Health University of East Anglia M.Cooper@uea.ac.uk   I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your President I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and […]

        Introduction by Global States conference organizers Anna Cavness, Jian Chen, Michelle Cho, Wendy Piquemal, Erin Trapp, and Tim Wong. Video by Laura Johnson.   [image of Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak]  The following dialogue between Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak took place on 6 May 2006 as the keynote event […]

  Arturo Arias Program in Latin American Studies University of Redlands arturo_arias@redlands.edu   At the first conference on Maya studies in Guatemala City (August 1996), Luis Enrique Sam Colop, a K’iché Maya academic, public intellectual and newspaper columnist who debates politics in the national press, accused the country’s most celebrated Ladino writer, novelist Miguel Angel […]