POSTMODERN CULTURE

Ioana Literat (bio)University of Southern Californiailiterat@usc.edu A review of Talk to Me, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), July 24th to November 7th.    Talk to Me, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, is a paradigmatic collection of new media artistic experiments and an open experimental […]

Jordan Alexander Stein (bio)University of Colorado at Boulderjordan.a.stein@colorado.edu   Since the 1990s, internet surfers have enjoyed a proliferation of online serial comics. Though similar in design to many print comics, webcomics are distinguished by their accessibility, as they are effectively free and updated regularly (often daily). As of 2007, the number of webcomics in production […]

Scott Herring (bio)Indiana University, Bloomingtontsherrin@indiana.edu Abstract Using the cable television show Hoarders as its primary case study, this essay offers a theory of “material deviance” that fuses a primary interest of material culture studies—the social status of objects—with a central concern of queer studies—the roles that deviance and normalization play in social management. Placing these two […]

Laura Jones (bio)Louisiana State Universityljone82@lsu.edu Abstract Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, delivered during the 2008 presidential campaign in response to controversy surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, responds to a split and often conflicting need both to reassure voters and to challenge conventional notions of identity. In doing so, the language of the speech simultaneously […]

Sean Reynolds (bio)SUNY Buffalostr8@buffalo.edu Abstract This essay explores the erotic and “perverse” undercurrents of homophonic translation by looking at David Melnick’s 1983 Men in Aida, a strict homophone of Homer’s Iliad into English. In order to build a foundational vocabulary for the homophonic as a translation, this essay turns to Walter Benjamin”s “The Task of […]

eldritch Priest (bio)outremonk@gmail.com Abstract “Listening to Nothing in Particular” examines contemporary boredom through the lens of recent experimental composition. While boredom is typically treated in the arts as a conceit of transcendence or radical indifference, this essay argues that the mood in contemporary post-Cagean compositional practices articulate a much more ambivalent feeling of being unjustified, […]

Gregory Steirer University of Pennsylvania steirer@english.upenn.edu Abstract This essay examines the influence of Situationist thought on aesthetics in postwar Britain through a close analysis of Throbbing Gristle, a fine-arts-cum-pop group responsible for the invention of the dystopian subculture Industrial Culture. Framing the group’s work as a response to the politics of 1970s Social Art, the […]

Sean Braune (bio) York Universitysbraune@yorku.ca  Abstract John Cage’s poetry is often analyzed in relation to conceptual writing and constraint, making Cage seem particularly absent. This essay argues that the conceptual writing found in “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” is not devoid of emotion. Quite the contrary, the mesostics become the equivalent of a love letter. By […]

Jennie Berner (bio)University of Illinois, Chicagojennieberner@hotmail.com Abstract  C.D. Wright’s engagement with documentary technology—stenography in Deepstep Come Shining and tintype photography in One Big Self—reveals a contradictory impulse in her poetry: to document individualized data while abstracting this data into “type.” Wright uses this contradiction to underline the incommensurability of two literary discourses in Deepstep Come […]

Lisa Guenther (bio)Vanderbilt Universitylisa.guenther@vanderbilt.edu Abstract In recent years, comparisons between abortion and slavery have become increasingly common in American pro-life politics. Some have compared the struggle to extinguish abortion rights to the struggle to end slavery. Others have claimed that Roe v Wade is the Dred Scott of our time. Still others have argued that […]

Max Cavitch (bio)University of Pennsylvaniacavitch@english.upenn.edu  Fig. 1. Stills from “Pit Bull attacking little dog on streets of NYC.” MissWooHoo11. Youtube. 27 Jun. 2012. Web. 13 Dec. 2012. Blogs, news Web sites, and content aggregators of all kinds feed a vast stream of stories about domesticated animals ostensibly “gone wild.” The Huffington Post even has a […]

Rory Ferreira (bio)St. Norbert Collegerory.ferreira@snc.edu I started writing raps seriously when my friend Robert drowned buck naked in a public pool. Like any self-absorbed, depressed-for-no-reason 19 year old, I was reading Camus, and the absurdity he talks about became, rather suddenly, all too real. This happened a year ago and resulted in the creation of […]

Patty Ahn (bio)USC School of Cinematic Artspahn@usc.edu   In May of 2012, Visual Communications hosted its 28th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF), offering ten days filled with feature-length films, short programs, panels, and social events that formed a cross-section of the current state of Asian American media. Visual Communications (VC), a Los […]

Carol Colatrella (bio)Georgia Institute of Technologycarol.colatrella@lcc.gatech.edu Review of Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Durham: Duke UP, 2011, Rob Wilkie, The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, New York: Fordham UP, 2011.  Over the past year, faculty members in my interdisciplinary department at Georgia Tech responded to the request by […]

Graham Hammill (bio)University at Buffalo, SUNYghammill@buffalo.edu Review of Filippo del Lucchese, Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation. New York: Continuum, 2009.   Filippo del Lucchese’s Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza is a welcome addition to the growing collection of scholarly works that firmly place Spinoza in a […]

Damjana Mraovic-O’Hare (bio)damjana.mraovic@case.edu Case Western Reserve University Review of Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Print.  The critical discourse about postmodernism has recently taken a turn toward declarations that postmodernism is dead, finished, past. The aftermath of 9/11 and the trend of […]

Patty Ahn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Critical Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include critical histories and theories of U.S. television, transnational media studies with a regional focus on the Pacific Rim, gender and sexuality, and sound and popular music. She has been published in Spectator, European Journal of Cultural […]