PostModern Culture was one of the first online academic journals--probably
the very first to deal with film/TV-related topics. I just received the
table of contents (see below) for their latest issue and learned that they
have joined Johns Hopkins Press' "Project Muse" (as has Wide Angle,
incidentally).
One of the repercussions of this move is that PMC will now start charging
for past issues--although the current issue will still be distributed for
free. I can understand the reasons for making this change and cannot fault
the PMC editors for doing so, but it does sadden me a little. As the
Internet and the World Wide Web "mature" it seems like fewer and fewer
resources are available without charge. And as those charges mount, the
distribution of information, data, opinion and analysis becomes
increasingly limited.
I have conflicted feelings about enterprises such as Project Muse. Does
anyone else share my ambivalence?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Volume 7, Number 2 (January, 1997) ISSN: 1053-1920
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Editors: Eyal Amiran
Lisa Brawley
Stuart Moulthrop
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Paula Geyh
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
List Manager: Jessamy Town
Research Assistant: Anne Sussman
Editorial Board:
Sharon Bassett Phil Novak
Michael Berube Chimalum Nwankwo
Nahum Chandler Patrick O'Donnell
Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr
Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff
J. Yellowlees Douglas Fred Pfeil
Jim English Peggy Phelan
Graham Hammill David Porush
Phillip Brian Harper Mark Poster
David Herman Carl Raschke
bell hooks Avital Ronell
E. Ann Kaplan Susan Schultz
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos
Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart
Neil Larsen Allucquere Roseanne Stone
Tan Lin Gary Lee Stonum
Saree Makdisi Chris Straayer
Jerome McGann Rei Terada
Uppinder Mehan Paul Trembath
Jim Morrison Greg Ulmer
Larysa Mykata
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Readers,
With our January, 1997 issue, Postmodern Culture begins
publishing with the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hopkins' innovative Muse project promises to advance
the art of electronic publishing in ways that will
benefit the journal and its readers. Johns Hopkins
Press will also provide much needed financial and
technical support. This new arrangement entails some
changes in our operation, but we'll continue to bring
you innovative and challenging interdisciplinary work
and hope you'll continue with us in this intellectual
and publishing adventure.
Postmodern Culture will continue to be published three
times each academic year: September, January, and May.
As each new issue of the journal becomes available it
will appear simultaneously at the journal's current
World Wide Web address (WWW.IATH.VIRGINIA.EDU/PMC) and
on JHUP's Project Muse online journals site
(MUSE.JHU.EDU). The Virginia site will offer the
current issue in World Wide Web format (HTML) free of
charge. When a new issue is published it will replace
the prior issue. Back issues will not be available at
this site.
The Hopkins site will provide SGML-encoded text,
searchable access to all issues and volumes of the
journal, and other enhancements including document
delivery by special order. Access to this site and its
services is by paid subscription. Readers affiliated
with institutions that subscribe to the Muse project
will have access through those subscriptions. To find
out if your institution subscribes, see our subscriber
list (MUSE.JHU.EDU/PROJ_DESCRIP/SUBSCRIBED.HTML).
Institutions may obtain PMC either through a
full-resource subscription to Project Muse or
through a single-title subscription at the rate of
$50 per year. Individuals not affiliated with subscribing
institutions may subscribe for $20 per year.
Subscription information can be found at <MUSE.JHU.EDU/ORDERING/>.
Institutional subscription information is at
<MUSE.JHU.EDU/ORDERING/SUBSCRIPTION_FORM.HTML> and individual
subscription information is at
<WWW.PRESS.JHU.EDU/ACCESS/INDIV_FORM.HTML>.
JHUP will notify individual subscribers of the contents
of each issue as soon as it is published. Later in the
year subscribers will be offered an article
notification service that will record a user profile
reflecting particular interests in subjects or authors.
The PMC LISTSERV list will continue at Johns Hopkins.
JHUP will distribute the table of contents for each
issue through this list; however, because conversion
from HTML/SGML to ASCII is prohibitively complex and
expensive, we will no longer provide text-only versions
of articles.
The change from free electronic distribution to a
combination of free and for-fee access may surprise
some of our readers, so it deserves an explanation.
Since the founding of the journal, the University of
Virginia and North Carolina State University have
generously subsidized PMC's operations, but they cannot
continue this support. Grants for startup funding have
gradually been exhausted. In order to carry on, the
journal needs a source of income.
PMC has been and continues to be the work of many
volunteers. The editors and editorial board contribute
their time and efforts without remuneration.
Nonetheless, the journal incurs numerous costs,
including a paid staff (our hard-working managing
editor and various assistants), postage, telephone
bills, advertising, software, supplies, etc. We have to
recover some of these operating expenses.
Gaining financial solvency is one reason we've
affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Press, a
publisher that is in the forefront when it comes to
providing inexpensive, broad access to electronic
scholarly materials. Project Muse, JHUP's innovative
electronic journals collection, enables worldwide,
networked access via subscription to the full text of
over forty journals. Muse currently enables access by
over 2.3 million academics at more than 260 subscribing
institutions, as well as to the 4 million residents of
Cleveland and Pittsburgh through their public library
systems.
We're very pleased that Johns Hopkins has agreed to
work with us to meet the challenges of publishing a
contemporary academic journal. With this new situation
PMC finds a stable home and secures its future; we
think that this arrangement offers as much as possible
both to casual and professional readers at minimum
cost. Academic publishers will have to find new
paradigms that serve their audience in the evolving
electronic environment. That is what we have endeavored
to do ourselves, and will continue to do as part of
Project Muse.
If you are affiliated with an academic institution,
please encourage the library to subscribe to the Muse
collection and/or to PMC.
Thank you.
EYAL AMIRAN
LISA BRAWLEY
STUART MOULTHROP
JOHN UNSWORTH
Editors, Postmodern Culture
--------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Arkady Plotnitsky, "'But It Is Above All Not True':
Derrida, Relativity, and the 'Science Wars'"
Maria Damon, "Lenny Bruce's 1962 Obscenity Trial:
Public Culture and the Jewish Entertainer as
Cultural Lightning Rod"
Tony Thwaites, "Currency Exchanges: The Postmodern,
Vattimo, Et Cetera, Among Other Things (Et Cetera)"
Heikki Raudaskoski, "'The Feathery Rilke Mustaches
and Porky Pig Tattoo on Stomach': High and Low
Pressures in _Gravity's Rainbow_"
Penelope Engelbrecht, "Bodily Mut(il)ation:
Enscribing Lesbian Desire"
Steven Jones, "The Book of _Myst_ in the Late Age of
Print"
-----------------
Fiction
Paul Andrew Smith, "Radio Free Alice"
Gregory Wolos, "Son of Kong, How Do You Do?"
-----------------
Reviews
David DeRose, "'A Lifetime of Anger and Pain': Kali
Tal and the Literature of Trauma." Review of Kali
Tal, _Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of
Trauma_. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Thomas Vogler, "Dressing the Text: On the Road with
the Artist's Book." Review of _Dressing the Text_
exhibition.
Lynda Hall, "Holly Hughes Performing:
Self-Invention and Body Talk." Review of Holly
Hughes, _Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler_. New York:
Grove, 1996.
Tammy Clewell, "Failing to Succeed: Toward a
Postmodern Ethic of Otherness." Review of Ewa
Plonawska Ziarek, _The Rhetoric of Failure:
Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of
Modernism_. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
Sujata Iyengar, "The Resuscitation of Dead
Metaphors." Review of "Incorporating the Antibody:
Women, History and Medical Discourse," a
conference held at the University of Western
Ontario, October 5-6, 1996, and the accompanying
exhibition "Speculations: Selected Works from
1983-1996," by Barbara McGill Balfour.
Mike Hill, "What Was (the White) Race? Memory,
Categories, Change." Review of Noel Ignatiev and
John Garvey, eds, _Race Traitor_ (New York:
Routledge, 1996) and Mab Segrest, _Memoir of a Race
Traitor_ (Boston: South End Press, 1994).
-----------------
Letters
-----------------
Related Readings
-----------------
Notices
-----------------
Arkady Plotnitsky, "'But It Is Above All Not True':
Derrida, Relativity, and the 'Science Wars'"
o Abstract: The article considers a remark by
Jacques Derrida on Einstein's relativity. This
remark has been widely circulated without proper
scholarly and philosophical treatment in recent
discussions around the so-called "Science Wars,"
in the wake of Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's
_Higher Superstition_, and then Alan Sokal's "hoax
article." By examining several specific responses
to Derrida's statement and his work in general by
scientists and others, the article argues that
this circulation is a symptom of a deeper problem
that permeates the current intellectual
landscape--still the landscape of "two cultures"
(scientific and humanistic) in spite, and even
because, of massive transformations of both these
cultures and of the interactions between them
during recent decades. This problem shapes the
reception of the work of Derrida and several other
figures, such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel
Serres, and Gilles Deleuze, on the part of the
scientific community. The article examines the
circumstances, contexts and meanings of Derrida's
remark, and considers the general question of
reading philosophical texts, such as Derrida's,
that engage or refer to mathematics and science.
It also suggests a reading of Derrida's statement
itself that will, hopefully, lead to more
productive responses to the work of Derrida and
other recent thinkers on the part of the
scientific community.--ap
Maria Damon, "Lenny Bruce's 1962 Obscenity Trial: Public
Culture and the Jewish Entertainer as Cultural
Lightning Rod"
o Abstract: In 1962, comedian Lenny Bruce was tried
for obscenity in San Francisco and, for the only
time in his many subsequent arrests and trials,
acquitted. The trial transcript documents a moment
in San Francisco's history, bringing together the
social currents surrounding the emergence of a gay
men's community; the discourse of expertise and
the town/gown politics of the Irish/Italian police
force against the "long beards" at Berkeley; and
the tensions between the language of juridical
process and that of the carnivalesque. San
Francisco was shortly to become a center for
several different countercultures noted for their
flamboyant aesthetic and their emphasis on
alternate social organizing units (the spectrum of
gay relationships, hippie "tribes," Third World
arts communes, etc.), which questioned the
traditional relationship of sexuality to
reproduction and family life. I want to argue
that, though he was neither gay, San Franciscan,
politically active in the conventional sense, nor
literary in the conventional sense, Bruce's role
as hyperverbal Jewish "entertainer" (in-betweener)
set his trial as a moment signaling cultural
change in San Francisco. Further, this scenario
resonates with more recent and ongoing debates
about the role of non-normative artistic
expression in civic life.--md
Tony Thwaites, "Currency Exchanges: The Postmodern,
Vattimo, et cetera, Among Other Things (et cetera)"
o Abstract: A frequent criticism of the idea of the
postmodern is that it lacks both clear referent
and conceptual coherence. It may be more useful to
see what is going on in such debates in terms of a
performative and asyndetic logic, whose figure is
the instability of the list, neither coherent nor
incoherent. Drawing on the work of Gianni Vattimo,
this article tries to reframe the terms of the
debate by suggesting a concept of the aesthetic
which would be neither simply vanguardist nor
populist, but linked intimately to the possibility
of community, history, the political and
social.--tt
Heikki Raudaskoski, "'The Feathery Rilke Mustaches and
Porky Pig Tattoo on Stomach': High and Low Pressures in
_Gravity's Rainbow_"
o Abstract: On one occasion Mikhail Bakhtin
describes his famous "chronotopes" as places
"where knots of narrative are tied and untied".
While it is very difficult to find chronotopes
like these in Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_,
many passages in the text nevertheless keep
asking: where and how do characters and readers
(and the text itself) position themselves? What
time are they in? The novel certainly posits the
existence of an epic, unilinear, and apocalyptic
time; however, this kind of time never arrives
inside the text. Thus possibilities for novelness,
something new, remain. What positional
possibilities, then, does this leave for
characters and the narrator? This essay tries to
find answers to this question by studying how the
binary opposition of "high" and "low" works in the
novel in various respects.
These positionalities prove "highly" unstable in
the novel. The vain search for high unities
results in low-feeling melancholies. On the other
hand, only through low, popular cultural genres it
is possible, at least momentarily, to feel high.
Neither high canon (as, obviously, in Joyce's
_Ulysses_) nor low carnivalism (as in Bakhtin's
reading of Rabelais) prove capable of attaining
supremacy. Yet this does not have to lead to
"postmodernism" as neutralized relativism.
_Gravity's Rainbow_'s labyrinthine carnivalism is
different. Although there are no pure, closed
sites for low marginals, either, positional
tensions will not ease off. On the contrary: just
because transcendental subjects and dialectical
syntheses turn impossible, the novel is able to
maintain hard and urgent questions of
positionality.--hr
Penelope Engelbrecht, "Bodily Mut(il)ation: Enscribing
Lesbian Desire"
o Abstract: "What do lesbians really want?"
I raise this question in my essay, and offer a
conditional answer that devolves from the
inter/active relation of lesbian Other/Self and
lesbian Subject: a mutual relation mediated by
their lesbian Desire, that Desire characterizing
and characterized by alinear %jouissance%.
Because that pro/vocative lesbian %jouissance% may
be construed in analogy to Derridean %differance%, I
perceive lesbian Desire as enscribed in erotic
textual site(s) of "saturated %aporia%." I explain
how the "un/mark" refers to those ambivalent signs
of bodily mutilation--s/m-inflicted bruises, scars
of assault, and particularly mastectomy
scars--which may be read and re-read as
transformative signs, for example, of pain which
becomes pleasure, of horror which metamorphoses
into and through healing.
These bodily un/marks comprise the multi-valent
signifiers of a corporeal mut(il)ation which not
only gestures toward an "essentialistic" lesbian
embodiment, but which also articulates that
essential materiality as/in an inter/active
performativity. I observe lesbian sign, text, body
as mutable situations of relational Desire even as
they enable the endless mutation(s) of lesbian
Desire, a mutual activity which remains ever
in(con)clusive.
One answer to the question? Lesbians Desire more
time--pe
Steven Jones, "The Book of _Myst_ in the Late Age of Print"
o Abstract: This essay considers the CD-ROM game
_Myst_, arguably the most widely experienced
hypernarrative (if not exactly hypertext) of our
time. In _Myst_ and its paratexts--prequel, sequel,
sources, and marketing--we see dramatized some
fundamental cultural anxieties surrounding the
emergence of hypertext in the late age of print.
The primary sign of these anxieties in the game is
the ubiquitous image of the magical "linking"
book, floating above the landscape or concealed in
the machines that structure the game-play, clearly
representing hypertext and what it portends for
the aura of the Book in the late age of print.
From the game and its books we move to an
important precursor, Jules Verne's _The Mysterious
Island_, which serves in turn as a link to the
subgenre of Victorian adventure fiction and its
bookish obsessions with technology (and islands).
Then, linking forward to a recent work, Neal
Stephenson's SF novel, _The Diamond Age_, the essay
concludes by suggesting how _Myst_ inevitably
exceeds the boundaries of its authors' intentions,
aura, and back-story novelization. The essay
recognizes that, on the one hand (as J. David
Bolter has argued), the book may be moving to the
margins of culture, but on the other hand (as
Maurice Blanchot reminds us), culture remains
tenaciously "linked to the book." At the heart of
a mass-audience hypertext adventure game, the Book
in _Myst_ signals a profound anxiety over the
impending absence of the material book as an
object of cultural significance.--sj
--------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE
UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE AT http://www.iath.virginia.
edu/pmc/issue.197/contents.197.html. FOR ACCESS TO BACK
ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES,
YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE,
(http://muse.jhu.edu) THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.
----
Jeremy Butler
[log in to unmask]
ScreenSite http://www.sa.ua.edu/ScreenSite
Telecommunication & Film/University of Alabama/Tuscaloosa
----
To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L
in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]
|
