CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Sianne Ngai, "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-
Century Aesthetics" 

N. Katherine Hayles, "Flickering Connectivities in Shelley 
Jackson's _Patchwork Girl_: The Importance of Media-Specific 
Analysis" 

George Dillon, "Dada Photomontage and net.art Sitemaps" 

Bernd Herzogenrath, "Stop Making Sense: Fuck 'em and 
Their Law (... It's Only I and O but I Like It...)" 

Tamise Van Pelt, "Otherness" 

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                           Review Essay

Stefan Mattessich, "Grotesque Caricature: Stanley 
Kubrick's _Eyes Wide Shut_ as the Allegory of Its Own 
Reception." A review of Stanley Kubrick's _Eyes Wide 
Shut_. Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. 
Perf. Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Sydney Pollack. 
Warner Brothers, 1999. 

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                             Reviews

Steven Helmling, "Brecht Our (Post-) Contemporary." 
A review of Fredric Jameson, _Brecht and Method_. London 
and New York: Verso, 1998. 

Nezih Erdogan, "Veiled and Revealed." A review of 
Meyda  Yegenoglu, _Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist 
Reading of Orientalism_. London and New York: Cambridge UP, 
1998.

Jurgen Pieters, "Past, Present and Future: New 
Historicism versus Cultural Materialism." A review 
of John Brannigan, _New Historicism and Cultural Materialism_. 
New York: MacMillan, 1998.

Lynn Houston, "The Truth About Pina Bausch: Nature 
and Fantasy in _Carnations_." A review of Pina Bausch, _Carnations_. 
Perf. Tanztheater Wuppertal. Gammage Auditorium, Tempe. 
22 October 1999. 

Matthew Abraham, "The Critical Idiom of Postmodernity
and Its Contributions to an Understanding of Complexity." 
A review of Paul Cilliers, _Complexity and Postmodernism: 
Understanding Complex Systems_. London: Routledge, 1998. 

Brad Lucas, "Near Collisions: Rhetorical Cultural 
Studies or a Cultural Rhetorical Studies?" A review of 
Thomas Rosteck, ed., _At the Intersection: Cultural 
Studies and Rhetorical Studies_. New York: Guilford, 1999. 

David Schuermer, "Utopian Ironies." A review of Andrew 
Ross, _The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the 
Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town_. New York: 
Ballantine Books, 1999. 

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                     Related Readings
                    [WWW Version Only]

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                     Bibliography of
                      Postmodernism
                   and Critical Theory
                    [WWW Version Only]

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                         Notices
                    [WWW Version Only]

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                   Notes on Contributors

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                        Abstracts

Sianne Ngai, "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-
Century Aesthetics"

    o Abstract: In "Stuplimity," I situate work by contemporary 
      American poets against a tradition of literary 
      innovation heralded by Stein's massive _The Making of 
      Americans_ (1906-08), in order to explore the relation 
      between negative affectivity and aesthetic agency. My essay 
      focuses on the logics of extreme excitation ("shock") and 
      enervation ("boredom") at the site of their paradoxical 
      convergence in twentieth-century writing and visual art. 
      Using texts by Stein, West, Poe, and Beckett as models, I 
      describe this strange synthesis of excitation and fatigue 
      as "stuplimity," a neologism intended to invoke the older 
      aesthetic category of the sublime without its implications 
      of profundity. While the sublime emerges in confrontations 
      with the infinite and natural, the "stuplime" emerges in 
      encounters with vast but finite artificial systems, 
      resulting in repetitive acts of nominalism, enumeration, 
      and classification. Though both encounters give rise to 
      negative affective experience, the latter involves comic 
      exhaustion rather than terror. Focusing on cycles of 
      astonishment and fatigue enacted in a range of cultural 
      productions, I show how this twentieth-century sensibility 
      enables subjects to fashion a paradoxical agency from the 
      critical negotiation of their inscription within 
      machine-like systems, like "language."--sn 

N. Katherine Hayles, "Flickering Connectivities in Shelley 
Jackson's _Patchwork Girl_: The Importance of Media-Specific
Analysis"

    o Abstract: In his important book _Authors and Owners: The 
      Invention of Copyright_, Mark Rose shows that copyright 
      did more than provide a legal basis for intellectual 
      property. It also defined the literary work as an 
      immaterial intellectual production, the author as a 
      creative genius, literary value as consisting first and 
      foremost of originality, and a subjectivity epitomized by 
      the individual who possessed himself and whose most 
      characteristic trait was a mind conceptualized as separate 
      and distinct from the body. This ideological formation had 
      the effect of systematically suppressing bodies and 
      materialities of several kinds: the body of the book, the 
      bodies of author and reader, and the commercial networks 
      that produce print books as commodities to be consumed. 
      In Shelley Jackson's electronic hypertextual fiction 
      _Patchwork Girl_, these constructions inherited from the 
      eighteenth century are replaced by a vision of 
      subjectivity as multiple and fragmented, a performance 
      of the literary work as collaborative and "seam'd with 
      scars," and an enactment of reading as a cyborg practice 
      that disrupts the boundaries of the text and reader alike. 
      _Patchwork Girl_ demonstrates that many of our contemporary
      assumptions about literature continue to reinscribe 
      traditional ideas about literary works that are grounded 
      specifically in print technologies. As we work toward a 
      critical theory capable of dealing with the kind of 
      dispersed electronic text that _Patchwork Girl_ 
      instantiates, we may also be able to understand for the 
      first time the full extent to which print technologies have 
      affected our understanding of literature.--kh 

George Dillon, "Dada Photomontage and net.art Sitemaps"

    o Abstract: Maps of websites represent them as networks of 
      linked files that provide perspective on a given site 
      and its parts. Some imagemaps are utterly standardized 
      (those for information retrieval, for example), but some 
      move beyond simple navigation to provide a visual 
      interpretation of the information these sites convey. 
      This essay sketches a semiotics of website imagemaps. I
      argue that even more than Cubist collage, Dada 
      photomontage, as seen in the work of Höch, Hausmann, 
      Schwitters, and Grosz/Heartfield, provides a paradigm 
      for such a semiotics. Dada photomontage uses suggestive 
      images composed of signifying fragments ranging from small 
      schematic arrangements to wildernesses of profusion. I 
      explore several patterns (matrix, swirl, cascade) and 
      their associated semantics; I then apply these categories 
      and principles to website imagemaps to see what the 
      imagemap is saying visually about the site and our 
      experience of it.--gd 

Bernd Herzogenrath, "Stop Making Sense: Fuck 'em and 
Their Law (... It's Only I and O but I Like It...)"

    o Abstract: This paper analyzes the cultural phenomenon 
      of Techno music within the context of post-structuralist 
      theory, literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy. The 
      Prodigy's album _Music For The Jilted Generation_ 
      anchors this discussion, which itself is a kind of 
      polylogue between the voice of The Law, represented by 
      Great Britain's _Criminal Justice Bill_, and samples of
      Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Bataille. These 
      samples can be said to speak of Techno as that strange, 
      disturbing machine always already underlying the cultural 
      machine. Techno, in its decidedly a-political 
      self-fashioning, nevertheless takes part in a politics of 
      subversion. Not a subversion of The Law or its modes of 
      communication, but a subversion that consists of forcing 
      signification *against itself*, by foregrounding the 
      signifier against the signified, the polymorphous drive 
      against repressive, phallic desire, and pre-oedipal 
      childhood against post-oedipal adulthood. It is not a 
      "Rage against the machine" from the (however illusory) 
      position of a non-machinic other, but a "Rage of the 
      (pure) machine against the (oedipal) machine," a "*rage 
      against the Symbolic*." Techno does not speak from the 
      position of either *one or the other*, not from a position 
      *of either side within* difference, but from the chiastic 
      position *of difference itself*, from the different 
      "origin" of the symbolic, where the *law of the signifier* 
      is opposed to The *Law of the signified*. Thus its prodigal 
      rant: "Fuck 'em and *Their* Law."--bh 

Tamise Van Pelt, "Otherness"

    o Abstract: Though contemporary theories that deploy the 
      concept of the Other frequently cite the work of Jacques 
      Lacan, the Other of identity theory and Lacanian 
      Otherness have little in common. Lacan postulates a 
      decentered Otherness predicated on a gap between an 
      Other and an other that echoes a gap between the Subject 
      and the ego. Taken together, Lacan's decenterings of both 
      the Subject and the Other articulate a post-humanist 
      subjectivity at odds with contemporary constructions of 
      "the Other" as a person, particularly a person who is 
      marginal or subversive in some way. After clarifying the 
      crucial differences between the Other of identity theories 
      and the Otherness of Lacan, I explore two key encounters 
      between Lacanian analysis and identity theory in which 
      the Otherness of the Other is at stake: Abdul R. 
      JanMohamed's reading of colonial discourse via the Lacanian 
      registers, and Judith Butler's critique of the Lacanian 
      registers in _Bodies That Matter_. Since Butler's critique 
      explicitly connects Lacan's concept of the phallus to 
      Otherness, I include an exploration of phallic discourse 
      and alterity, suggesting that a post-humanist politics of
      identity has much to gain from a decentering of Otherness. 
      To illustrate such a politics of Otherness, I conclude with 
      a "found" feminist reading from N. Katherine Hayles's 
      _How We Became Posthuman_.--tv