POSTMODERN CULTURE on-line journal
Sat, 23 Mar 91 13:24:39 CST
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.
____________________________________________________________
