POSTMODERN CULTURE is an online journal that hopes to deal with TV and film issues that fall within pomo's purview. They've had two issues so far and, although they haven't yet done much with film/TV yet, I think there's a lot of potential for exploration here. Following is the info on issue no. 2, including abstracts for the essays included, and info on how to subscribe. (It's a bit longer than usual posts; sorry about that.) #################################### ## #### #### #### ## P O S T M O D E R N ## #### #### # ## # #### #### ## C U L T U R E ## #### ## ## #### ####### ## ######### ###### #### #### ## an electronic journal ## ######### ###### #### ## of interdisciplinary #################################### criticism ------------------------------------------------------------ Volume 1, Number 2 (January, 1991) ISSN: 1053-1920 ------------------------------------------------------------ Editors: Eyal Amiran, Issue Editor John Unsworth Book Review Editor: Elaine Orr Editorial Assistants: Bryan Bott Gloria Maxwell Editorial Board: Kathy Acker Chimalum Nwankwo Sharon Bassett Phil Novak Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell Marc Chenetier Susan Ohmer Greg Dawes John Paine R. Serge Denisoff Marjorie Perloff Robert Detweiler Mark Poster Jim English Carl Raschke Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mike Reynolds Joe Gomez Avital Ronell Robert Hodge Andrew Ross bell hooks Jorge Ruffinelli Susan Howe Susan M. Schultz E. Ann Kaplan William Spanos Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer Larysa Mykyta Paul Trembath Greg Ulmer ------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT Masthead, Contents, Abstracts, CONTENTS 191 Instructions for retrieving files Patrick J. O'Donnell, "His Master's Voice: ODONNE-1 191 On William Gaddis's _JR_" ODONNE-2 191 Greg Ulmer, "Grammatology Hypermedia" ULMER 191 Susan Howe, "Incloser" HOWE 191 James McCorkle, "Combustion of Early MCCORKLE 191 Summer" and "The Love of My Life" (two poems) Charles Bernstein, "The Second War and BERNSTEI 191 Postmodern Memory" Alamgir Hashmi, "Post Scrotum" (a poem) HASHMI 191 Paul Trembath, "Sartre and Local Aesthetics: TREMBATH 191 Rethinking Sartre as an Oppositional Pragmatist" Frederick M. Dolan, "Crisis in the Gulf by DOLAN 191 George Bush, Saddam Hussein, et alia. As told to _The New York Times_" (a work-in-progress) FEATURES: Gerry O'Sullivan, "The Satanism Scare" POP-CULT 191 Henry Hart, "Graven Images" REVIEWS 191 A review of _Poetry as Epitaph_, by Karen Mills-Courts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990) The Editors, "Postface" POSTFACE 191 Announcements and Advertisements NOTICES 191 ------------------------------------------------------------ ABSTRACTS Patrick J. O'Donnell, "His Master's Voice: On William Gaddis's _JR_" Abstract: William Gaddis's _JR_ is a parody of American capitalism and education in which the reproduction of voice bears relation to Gaddis's conception of postmodern identity. The novel is comprised of a series of "conversations"--an interweaving of disparate voices--which reveal the commodification of voice and identity in postmodern culture. "Voice," in _JR_, is thoroughly instrumentalized, to the extent that it becomes a kind of "capital" as human interlocutors are enslaved to the prothesis of the telephone or television. Gaddis satirizes the McLuhanesque "global village" in this novel, which tells the story of an eleven-year old prodigy's rise and fall as kingpin of corporate network. Within this setting, the human body is represented as a form of resistance to the capitalist system: the "body without organs" of Deleuze and Guattari poses as a counter to the labyrinthine realm of deal and connection, the hierarchial systems and structures of the "marketplace." But the anti-hegemonic resistances of _JR_ are often placed within lyrical or nostalgic frameworks that reveal these resistances, themselves, to be forms of desire commodified. --PO Greg Ulmer, "Grammatology Hypermedia" Abstract: This essay examines the metaphors organizing user interface in hypermedia (especially the image of navigation through an ocean of information). It is organized as a montage sequence, simulating a series of links passing through an archive of data. The montage includes citational chunks on colonization (Columbus's voyage, the overland trails) juxtaposed with chunks on hypermedia, and on writing by means of collage, allegory, and series. The goal is to suggest a critique of the interface metaphor by noting the associations linking "exploring" an information environment with "colonialism." This experiment is offered as a possible prototype for teaching hypermedia thinking in alphabetic format (without equipment), and as an argument for including experimentation as such in the program of the journal. The status of this piece as a "meta-article," going beyond its previously published version to comment on some of the lessons learned by writing it, is meant to model a mode of research appropriate for an online journal. --GU Susan Howe, "Incloser" Abstract: In early New England narratives of conversion and later captivity narratives, a woman, afraid of not speaking well, tells her story to a man who writes it down. The "Incloser" is Thomas Shepard, the minister of the First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who transcribed the testimonies of conversion given by individual Puritans into a small pocket notebook between 1637 and 1645 in the wake of the Antinomian Controversy. Shepard's originality has been enclosed by later textual editors and scholars. "Incloser" is also concerned with my own consciousness as an American poet born in Boston in 1937 and writing at the close of the century. --SH Charles Bernstein, "The Second War and Postmodern Memory" Abstract: "The Second War and Postmodern Memory" is a highly speculative consideration of the effect the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews has had on post-war poetry in the United States. The essay addresses itself primarily to considerations of form and attitudes toward authority among the New American Poets (such as Olson or Ashbery or Creeley) and their immediate successors, poets born during the war itself (such as Susan Howe or Ted Greenwald). The work ends with a brief discussion of the direct treatment of the Extermination Process by Jerome Rothenberg and Charles Reznikoff. --CB Paul Trembath, "Sartre and Local Aesthetics: Rethinking Sartre as an Oppositional Pragmatist" Abstract: "Sartre and Local Aesthetics" attempts to rethink Sartre's activism as a politically engaged example of what might be called post-artistic aesthetic practice. The essay criticizes Benjamin's popular distinction between a politicized art and an aestheticized politics as a platitude of contemporary criticism, and considers what might remain useful for critical purposes in Sartre after postmodern critiques of both phenomenological language and Marxist theories of totality. The discussion draws on Foucault's work on the practices of the self and centers around the possibility of a Sartrean aesthetics of revolt, not on the cultural or political authority of his art and philosophy. --PT Frederick M. Dolan, "Crisis in the Gulf by George Bush, Saddam Hussein, et alia. As told to _The New York Times_" Abstract: The debate over the Bush administration's policy in the Gulf has taken the apparent form of an allegorical agon: Are Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm to be interpreted in terms of World War II, or Vietnam? Responding to the essentially contested character of the policy, press coverage has emphasized the constructed character of official policy justifications by resorting to tropes of irony in ways meant to highlight the gap between political sign and meaning. A consideration of Paul de Man's discussion of irony, allegory, and symbol, however, suggests that these tropes of skepticism, far from demystifying, function instead as tropes of mastery designed to secure the institutional privilege of journalism as _the_ "purveyor of truth" even in extreme situations of linguistic bad faith. --FD ------------------------------------------------------------ To retrieve any of the items listed above, send a mail message to LISTSERV@NCSUVM or [log in to unmask] containing as its one and only line the command GET [fn ft] PMC-LIST F=MAIL (replace [fn ft] with the filename and filetype, as listed in the table of contents, for the file you want to receive). There should be no blank lines, spaces, or other text preceding this line. To retrieve the whole issue as a package, send a mail message to LISTSERV@NCSUVM or [log in to unmask] with the command GET PMCV1N2 PACKAGE F=MAIL If you request the issue as a package, please make certain you have sufficient virtual disk space on your mainframe account to receive it (at least half a megabyte). More detailed instructions are available in the file NEWUSER PREFACE: to retrieve this file, send a mail message to LISTSERV@NCSUVM or [log in to unmask] with the command GET NEWUSER PREFACE PMC-LIST F=MAIL If none of the above works for you, contact the editors. _Postmodern Culture_ uses only ASCII text (the character-code common to all personal computers): this means that readers can download the text of the journal from the mainframe (where mail is received) to any personal computer and import it into almost all word- processing programs. Text in the journal uses a 65- character line, so you should set your margins accordingly before importing journal files into a word- processing program. ------------------------------------------------------------ _Postmodern Culture_ is published three times a year (January, May and September) using the Revised LISTSERV program ((c) Eric Thomas 1986, Ecole Centrale de Paris). It is distributed from an IBM mainframe at North Carolina State University, and is published with support from the NCSU Libraries, the NCSU Computing Center, the NCSU Office of Research Administration, and the NCSU Department of English. ----------------------------------------------------------- Subscription to the journal in its electronic-mail form is free. Each issue is available on disk and microfiche as well. Disk rates are $15/year for an individual and $30/year for an institution. For disks or fiche mailed to Canada add $3 postage; outside North America, add $7. Single issues available on disk only, for $6 (U.S.), $7 (Canada) or $8 (elsewhere). Postal correspondence, including payment for subscription and books for review, should be sent to: Postmodern Culture Box 8105 NCSU Raleigh, NC 27695 Electronic-text submissions and requests for e-mail subscription can be sent to the journal's editorial address (PMC@NCSUVM or [log in to unmask]). Using the same addresses, readers may also subscribe free of charge to PMC-Talk, an open discussion group for issues relating to the journal's contents, and to post- modernism in general. Submissions to the journal can be made by electronic mail, on disk, or in hard copy; disk submissions should be in WordPerfect or ASCII format, but if this is not possible please indicate the program and operating system used. The current MLA format is recommended for documentation in essays; a list of the text-formatting conventions used by _Postmodern Culture_ for ASCII text is available on request. ____________________________________________________________ Unless otherwise noted, copyrights for the texts which comprise this issue of _Postmodern Culture_ are held by their authors. The compilation as a whole is Copyright (c) 1991 by _Postmodern Culture_, all rights reserved. ____________________________________________________________