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. 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