POSTMODERN CULTURE

Bernard Duyfhuizen Department of English University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire pnotesbd@uwec.edu   Review of: Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day.New York: Penguin, 2006.   With Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon has given us his sixth novel in the forty-three years since V. was published in 1963. With that auspicious beginning (V. won the William Faulkner Foundation […]

Annette Schlichter Department of Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine aschlich@uci.edu   Kathy Acker entered the public stage in the 1980s as a countercultural author to emerge in the 1990s as an icon of dissident postmodern literature.1 Much of the critical literature on her complex works engages Acker’s deconstructions and re-representations of gender, the body, […]

Marc Botha Department of English Studies University of Durham m.j.botha@durham.ac.uk When the conversation gets rough . . .   The human impulse to talk is fundamental, whether in the form of conversation, discussion, debate, or argument. I am no exception, but whenever I participate I also find, sadly, that my attention wanders easily. I am […]

Stephen Voyce English Department York University svoyce@yorku.ca   Christian Bök was born on 10 August 1966 in Toronto, Canada. He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature […]

Jussi Parikka Media Studies Humboldt University, Berlin juspar@utu.fi   They are everywhere you look, bodiless brains breathing down your neck and controlling your desires. Where do they come from, how do they replicate, how can I get one, why do they look human?   –Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Living Blog”       Introduction: Cinematics of […]

Emily Apter is Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature at New York University. Books include: The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (1999), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (co-edited with William Pietz in 1993), Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (1991), and […]

Pieter Vermeulen (bio)Literature Faculty, Katholieke Universiteit Leuvenpieter.vermeulen@arts.kuleuven.be Review of: Anne-Lise François. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008.   Anne-Lise François’s Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience announces on its back cover that it will deal with movements of “affirmative reticence” and of “recessive action.” So what do we make […]

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)Department of English and Africana Studies, Texas A & M Universitymikko.tuhkanen@tamu.edu Review of JanMohamedAbdul R., The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’sArchaeology of Death. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.     Ginger: Listen, we’ll either die free chickens or die trying. Babs: Are those the only options?  –Chicken Run   All that [the slave] has is at stake; […]

Stephanie Hart (bio)York University, Department of Englishshart@yorku.ca Review of: Mark Sladen and Ariella Yedgar, eds. Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years. London: Merrell, 2007.     No art activity is to be understood apart from the codes and practices of the society which contains it; art in use is bracketed ineluctably within ideology.  ––Victor […]

Kenneth Goldsmith (bio)English Department, University of Pennsylvaniakg@ubu.com Review of: Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories. New York: Rizzoli, 2007.   Alex Ross, classical music critic for the New Yorker, recently published a chronicle of twentieth-century music called The Rest is Noise. The book made several bestseller lists and was nominated for a National […]

David Banash (bio)Department of English and Journalism, Western Illinois Universityd-banash@wiu.edu Review of: Julian Montague, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. New York: Abrams Image, 2006.   Seizing the amateur naturalist’s field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produced a provocative and haunting work that takes […]

Sven-Erik Rose (bio)Department of French and Italian, Miami University roses@muohio.edu     “But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive.”  –Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever   French novelist Patrick Modiano’s oeuvre is obsessed with les années noires of the German occupation and Vichy regime.1 Since he debuted in 1968 with […]

Michael Marder (bio)Department of Philosophy, University of Torontomichael.marder@utoronto.ca Abstract This essay inquires into the uncanny, unpredictable, and terrifying dimension of Levinasian ethics that retains the trace of impersonal existence or il y a (there is). After establishing that being, labor, and sense are but folds in the infinite fabric of the there is, the folds that […]

Amit RayDepartment of English, Rochester Institute of Technologyaxrgsl@rit.edu Evan SelingerDepartment of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technologyemsgsh@rit.edu Abstract Bruno Latour has turned to Indian vernacular fiction to illustrate the limits of ideology critique. In examining the method of literary analysis that underlies his appropriation of postcolonial history and culture, we appeal to Edward Said’s notion of “traveling […]

Emily Apter (bio)Department of French, New York Universityemily.apter@nyu.edu Abstract This essay considers the digital avatar not simply as a name for a virtual double of the player of videogames, but as bound to or manifesting psychological drive, a kind of homunculus of the drive. Drawing on a wide range of theories that have informed technical constructions […]

John Mowitt (bio)Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesotamowit001@umn.edu Abstract This essay explores some of the points of contact between philosophical reflection and dance. Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Plato, and […]