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Abstracts

Volume 11, Number 3
May, 2001

    Sara L. Knox, The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty

    • Abstract: At a time when the law considers "that a compelling claim of innocence is [not] alone grounds for federal intervention," what might have been the extra-legal foundation for the commutation of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas's death sentence? Lucas's florid claims to serial killing continue to perform an ideological and institutional function. His generic narrative of serial murder literally and symbolically supports a law-and-order discourse that translates private into public danger and attempts to "fix" dangerousness and vulnerability in certain classes of persons. Lucas's tales of cruelty and excessive violence are read here against Karla Faye Tucker's damning early confession of sadism and her attempted redemption through religious "witness." Although Tucker inspired more widespread cries for clemency than Lucas, her early boast to "thrill-killing" marked her out (like Lucas) as a rare form of "monster"--in her case, the antithesis of respectable femininity and a possible predictor of a new variety of feminine violence. A comparison of Tucker and Lucas's confessions demonstrates the power of narratives of violence to reinscribe and re-gender the limits of the public and the private, and to underwrite a powerfully punitive law-and-order discourse. --sk

    Hanjo Berressem, Serres Reads Pynchon / Pynchon Reads Serres

    • Abstract: This article aligns Michel Serres's book Genesis and Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon. Rather than noting their resonances within a single text, the article provides two separate readings--one of Serres and one of Pynchon--that are structured in a parallel fashion, so that each passage of the Serres text can be read as a commentary on the Pynchon text and vice versa. The single passages of the respective texts are connected by hypertextual links to allow switching from one text to the other. Ultimately, each text is meant to function as a commentary--or a series of extended footnotes--on the other, although each text can also be read as a text in and of itself. Main fields around which the resonances between the two texts develop are chaos--or better, complexity--theory (in particular as it concerns "multiplicity," "complexity," and the theory of "fluxions"), trauma theory (especially as it concerns the "cutting up" of both nature and culture with the scalpel of rationality), and topology (in particular concepts of unilaterality). In describing beginnings--in the case of Serres that of the world, in the case of Pynchon that of America--both texts reconstruct these as "sites of multiplicity." From within different textual genres, both texts advocate a point-of-view that cherishes difference and ambiguity over similarity and clarity. Ultimately, both texts provide powerful rhetorics against "straight lines" and against power structures and structures of knowledge that are based on "linear" models. --hb

    David Herman, Sciences of the Text

    • Abstract: This essay conducts a genealogical investigation of the notion "science of the text" in the writings of Roland Barthes. The author draws on recent developments in linguistics--more specifically, the subfield of discourse analysis--to argue that Barthes prematurely abandoned the pursuit of textual science as regulative ideal. The essay disputes the orthodox view that structuralist literary theorists such as Barthes were engaged in a doomed attempt to scientize (the study of) literary art; instead, it argues that Barthes and his fellow-travelers made an important effort to redraw the map that had, in the years preceding the rise of structuralism, fixed the positions of humanistic and scientific inquiry in cognitive and cultural space. Through an illustrative examination of a scene from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the essay suggests that structuralist approaches to textual analysis were problematic not because they aspired to the status of science, but because they mistook what any such science would have to look like. --dh

    Lee Spinks, Genesis and Structure and the Object of Postmodernism

    • Abstract: This essay focuses on the incoherence of one of the most influential descriptions of "postmodern" culture in order to rethink the epistemological origins of several contemporary intellectual formations. Why does Lyotard distinguish, in The Postmodern Condition, between "the postmodern" and postmodernism, and how can we reconcile his genetic account of the origins of postmodernism as the historical effect of a shift in the status of knowledge with his structural account of the postmodern as the future anterior of the modern? The essay argues that we should accept the obliquity of Lyotard's account as symptomatic of the difficulty of thinking through a set of concepts--the postmodern, modernity, and postmodernism--that are both produced and brought to crisis by their radicalization of the relationship between the historical "event" and the discursive structures within which "history" is represented to us as an object of knowledge. The "postmodern" should be understood in this sense as the force of difference or historicity that constitutes and exceeds every determinate structure. The essay employs this insight to rethink the time of (post)modernity by relocating the problem of genesis and structure within three major epistemological movements: the structure of Enlightenment critique advanced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the emergence of historical and philosophical "postmodernism" in the work of Dilthey and Nietzsche; and the contemporary disciplinary formations of post-structuralism and post-colonialism. --ls

    Mark Mossman, Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body

    • Abstract: This essay explores how disability is configured in cultural practice. The first section of the essay consists of the author's own personal experience with disability. This experience constitutes an example of autobiography by disabled persons. Personal narratives written by persons with disabilities are often acts of self-volition; these narratives resist negative cultural stereotype and instead allow for the individual to "re-become" an "able" person. The next stage of the essay departs from this personal autobiography by focusing on a work that is about disfigurement and resulting disability, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. After evaluating recent critical work on the novel, the author links these readings with the larger thesis of his essay. In this context, the creature "becomes" a monster. It tries to resist this tag through a long personal narrative located at the heart of the book. This narrative fails: its subject is unable to understand itself through any term other than "monstrous"; it is trapped within the identity given to it by its creator, who names it "hideous." This last point seems to undermine the larger position of the paper. The third section of the essay, therefore, attempts to explain the contradiction in the argument. The solution to this problem is the way bodies are being configured in postmodernity. The postmodern body is a utopian site, a space for self-definition and freedom. Examples used here are the transplanted body of professional basketball player Sean Elliott and the emerging technologies that allow once extremely disabled individuals, like the author, to become volitional persons. --mm

    Copyright (c) 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, 1994, 1993, 1992, 1991, 1990 Postmodern Culture & the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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