POSTMODERN CULTURE

Suzanne Diamond (bio)Youngstown State Universitysdiamond@ysu.edu Review of: Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford: Berg, 2006.   Gossip and conspiracy discourse have long been epistemologically suspect, and recent critical treatments tend either to celebrate or to excoriate these social phenomena. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip heralds a new […]

Christopher C. Robinson (bio)Clarkson Universityrobinscc@clarkson.edu Review of: Nana Last, Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space, & Architecture. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.   Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two of the core texts of philosophy’s linguistic turn in the twentieth century: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus, revered as the Bible of Logical Positivism, was written by a […]

Graham Hammill (bio)SUNY at Buffaloghammill@buffalo.edu Review of: Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2008.   We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it’s difficult not to […]

Susan A. Crane (bio)University of Arizonascrane@email.arizona.edu Review of: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.   Paris, 2001: an exhibition that commemorates the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the Holocaust stirs up a vehement public debate. Georges Didi-Huberman, a […]

Darren Wershler (bio)Wilfrid Laurier University Review of: Kenneth Goldsmith, The Weather. Los Angeles; Make Now, 2005, Goldsmith, Traffic. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007, and Goldsmith, Sports. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2008.   I can’t help it: trilogies are nerd Kryptonite. My childhood library was chock-full of science fiction and heroic fantasy books organized into epic […]

Stuart Moulthrop (bio)University of Baltimoresamoulthrop@ubmail.ubalt.edu   This essay reveals key plot details of the graphic novel Watchmen and the film based upon it.   On March 6, 2009, Warner Brothers released a motion picture based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder and written for the screen by David […]

David Greven (bio)Connecticut Collegedgrev@conncoll.edu  Abstract     As the most important and sustained cyborg narrative in Hollywood film, the Terminator films, particularly the first two, continue to demand a considerable amount of critical scrutiny. When the highly charged allegorical power of the figure of the cyborg is added to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star persona, now evolved […]

Jillian Smith (bio)University of North Floridajlsmith@unf.edu Abstract Driver’s Education, like all accident-prevention discourses, attempts to govern that which it cannot represent. Representing the accident reduces the multiple, complex force of its coming forth. The images of accidents shown to students in driver’s education can never be the accident that awaits them, and the accident that awaits […]

Kalindi Vora (bio)University of CaliforniaSan Diegokavora@ucsd.edu Abstract “Others’ Organs” explores the particular limits on the mobility of rural agriculturalist South Indians, middle class Sri Lankan women, and young Indian and Pakistani men, whose needs for jobs become entwined with the commodification of “life.” I argue that the material constraints on these workers, as well as the […]

Steve Garlick (bio)University of Victoriasgarlick@uvic.ca Abstract It is generally acknowledged that molecular biology has been enamored with discourses of information theory and cybernetics from its earliest days. Equally common, in critical theory, is the belief that biological science has lost purchase on important dimensions of embodied life as a result. This essay suggests, however, that when […]

Heidi R. Bean is Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. She is the co-editor of Poetry after Cultural Studies, an anthology of critical essays forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Her essays, reviews, and interviews related to the intersections of theater, performance, and poetry have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre […]

Christophe Wall-Romana (bio)University of Minnesotawallr007@umn.edu Review of: Daniel Kane, We Saw The Light: Conversations Between The New American Cinema and Poetry. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2009.    Kane’s book partakes of the renewed interest in contemporary humanities for the study of cross-medium exchanges, particularly involving literature, pioneered in the 1970s and somewhat marginalized by the […]

Michael D. Snediker (bio)Queen’s Universitysnediker@queensu.ca Review of: Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. It strikes me as both salubrious and unsurprising that after several decades of theorizing negative affect, melancholy, and trauma, the academy has turned its attention to the likes of positive affect, happiness, and optimism. As I’ve argued elsewhere, […]

Alan Nadel (bio)University of Kentuckyamnade2@email.uky.edu Review of: Karen Engle, Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2009. Print. Jeffrey Melnick, 9/11 Culture. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print. Marc Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. Print. Phillip E. […]

Apple Zefelius Igrek (bio)Seattle Universityigreka@seattleu.edu Review of: Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.    If there is a single, obsessive object of thought in Georges Bataille – from Guilty (1944/1988) and Blue of Noon (1957/1978) to his magnum opus The Accursed Share (1949/1988) – it is the […]

Timothy Campbell (bio)Cornell Universitycampbell@cornell.edu Review of: Lorenzo Fabbri, The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. Trans. Daniele Manni, London: Continuum, 2008. Print.    To choose security is to choose death. That such a lesson comes at the expense of Richard Rorty in a book on the relation of French deconstruction to American pragmatism is […]