POSTMODERN CULTURE

    Tan Lin   tall blank zebras appear   A To care. The aerogramme made a lily of necessity, stumped box, redolence ribboned far off in the glass cities I opened and closed to the dandy drawers. A colt emerged on a clotted pansy. A pan required fanning. This repose a thread files. Inside […]

    Judith Goldman and Lisa Jarnot   One   And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary? A “generation and transition” company make the water muddy. Transitional generation in company of a muddy mere formality: or was it going Dutch, in transmission to transition? A mere formality of Dutch, a merely formal vocabulary, to […]

Bill Millard Department of English Rutgers University millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu   “There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.”   –Weird Beard (Russell Lee Moore, a.k.a. Russ Knight), KLIF disk jockey in Libra   I. Paranoias and paradigms: Who’s afraid of Don DeLillo?   One of […]

Stephen Bernstein Department of English University of Michigan – Flint bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu   Aside from their humor, Don DeLillo’s novels are noted almost as frequently for their brilliant terror, manifested as a frisson at the core of contemporary existence. Frank Lentricchia comments on DeLillo’s “yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary […]

Peter Baker Department of English Towson State University e7e4bak@toe.towson.edu   Through the issues it raises, the kind of writing style it employs, and coming as it does in a series of other novels by Don DeLillo, Mao II demands to be treated seriously in the context of postmodern work and theory. Rather than spend time […]

Glen Scott Allen Department of English Towson State University e7e4all@toe.towson.edu   “Terror: from the Latin terrere, to frighten; intense fear; the quality of causing dread; terribleness; alarm, consternation, apprehension, dread, fear, fright.”   —Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary   “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner […]

John Unsworth Department of English University of Virginia jmu2m@virginia.edu   This journal does not usually run editor’s introductions, but with this issue it enters a new phase of its existence, and that new phase deserves some comment. For more than three years, Postmodern Culture has been publishing peer-reviewed critical and creative work in a text-only […]

THIS ISSUE ALL ISSUES TALK BACK MUSE IATH Bibliography of Postmodernism and Critical Theory Bibliographic Database Register Add an Entry Update an Entry Search by Author, Title, Keyword, or Contributor Browse by Title Browse by Author Browse by Contributor    IATH WWW Server

Lisa Brawley lbrawley@kent.edu   Stuart Moulthrop samoulthrop@UBmail.ubalt.edu   Co-editors   With this issue, we introduce an interactive annotated bibliography of postmodernism and critical theory. This bibliography began as a graduate student project in John Unsworth’s seminar on postmodern fiction and theory at the University of Virginia in the Fall of 1998. Students in that seminar […]

M. Klaver, r rickey, and L. Howell Department of English Universities of Calgary and Victoria lhowell@mtroyal.ab.ca rrickey@acs.ucalgary.ca klaverm@cadvision.co   E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge, 1996.   Looking for the Other responds to the charge that white feminist film theories, especially psychoanalytic ones, neglect issues […]

Lynn Houston Department of English Arizona State University lynnmhouston@yahoo.com   Pina Bausch, Carnations. Perf. Tanztheater Wuppertal. Gammage Auditorium, Tempe. 22 October 1999.   Freud’s elision of body-mind also suggests that the private mental space accorded to “the self” on modern models of identity, the space of fantasy, is produced to some extent by the body’s […]

    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu     Journal Announcements: 1) Sulfur 2) Denver Quarterly 3) Monographic Review/Revista Monografica 4) SubStance–special […]

    [What follows is a written exchange between the editors about the contents of this issue of Postmodern Culture. As a “postface,” it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers. Please send your comments on the […]

Henry Hart The College of William & Mary   Karen Mills-Courts. Poetry as Epitaph, Representation and Poetic Language. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990. 326 pp. $39.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.   It might seem strange that a book erected on the deconstructionist foundations of Jacques Derrida should take its title from that celebrated advocate […]

Gerry O’Sullivan University of Pennsylvania   The satanism scare has spawned its share of rumor panics over the last several years. This past Halloween, fundamentalist and evangelical pastors across the country fed faxes to one another about an international convocation of satanists allegedly held in Washington, D.C. in September. The gathering–or so self-described experts claimed–was […]

Frederick M. Dolan University of California at Berkeley   . . . the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.   — Paul de Man   In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we […]

Paul Trembath Colorado State University   And that lie that success was a moving upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in […]

–SBB with Alamgir Hashmi Islamabad, Pakistan   Post Scrotum   Watt? Yes. But the same when the Mal’oun died in the island; this island severed, repousse, reeling with peat-reek; this drizzle of grief– interminable falling on the wide sea. Moll’s face saffron-coloured, hair like petals plucked from a white chrysanthemum; local boys on stout or […]

Charles Bernstein State University of New York at Buffalo   Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand, Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen, And you’re as right as rain. . . . Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves . . . . […]

James McCorkle Hobart and William Smith Colleges   Combustion of Early Summer   The elation of the past is over, the news tells us, Suggesting it was there to begin with Or recoverable, like a heavy ore or a shipwreck.   But on closer inspection, the past buzzes around us, A conversation in another room […]

Susan Howe Temple University   Some of this essay has been published in The Politics of Poetic Form; Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein, Roof Books. [What follows is an excerpt from a book to be published in 1991 by Weaselsleeves Press. –Eds.]   Turned back from turning back as if a loved […]

Greg Ulmer University of Florida at Gainesville   This article is about an experiment I conducted for publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the Sixteenth Annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature: “Literacy Online: the Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers,” October 26-28, 1989 (organized by Myron Tuman). […]