CONTENTS 

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                      Editors' Note

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                         Articles
           
Terry Harpold, "Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet 
Metageographies"

Lee Morrissey, "Derrida, Algeria, and 'Structure, Sign, and 
Play'"

Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, "Fleshing the Text: Greenaway's 
_Pillow Book_ and the Erasure of the Body"

Robert Miklitsch, "Rock 'N' Theory: Autobiography, Cultural 
Studies, and the 'Death of Rock'"

Bruce Robbins, "Celeb-Reliance: Intellectuals, Celebrity, 
and Upward Mobility"


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                        Interview

Cynthia Hogue, "Interview with Harryette Mullen"   
 

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                         Reviews

Steven Helmling, "Jameson's Postmodernism: Version 2.0." 
A review of Fredric Jameson, _The Cultural Turn: Selected 
Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998._ Verso: London 
and New York, 1998; and Perry Anderson, _The Origins of 
Postmodernity._ Verso: London and New York, 1998.

Patrick Cook, "Cyberdrama in the Twenty-First Century." 
A review of Janet H. Murray, _Hamlet on the Holodeck: The 
Future of Narrative in Cyberspace._  New York: The Free 
Press, 1997.

Francois Debrix, "Post-Mortem Photography: Gilles Peress and 
the Taxonomy of Death." A review of Gilles Peress, _Farewell 
to Bosnia._ New York: Scalo, 1994; _The Silence._ New York: 
Scalo, 1995; and Gilles Peress and Eric Stover,_The Graves:  
Srebrenica and Vukovar._ New York: Scalo, 1998.

Adele Parker, "Living Writing: The Poethics of Helene 
Cixous."  A review of Helene Cixous and Mireille 
Calle-Gruber, _Helene Cixous, Rootprints:  Memory and Life
Writing._ Trans. Eric Prenowitz.  London: Routledge, 1997.

Jason Evan Camlot, "The Couch Poetato: Poetry and Television 
in David McGimpey's _Lardcake_." Toronto: ECW, 1997.


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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

Terry Harpold, "Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet 
Metageographies"

   o Abstract: This essay analyzes a series of cartographic 
     visualizations of the historical diffusion of the 
     Internet, as an example of the complicity of techniques 
     of scientific visualization with the contrasting 
     invisibility of political and economic formations.  
     Borrowing the term from Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen's 
     recent study of mapping discourses, _The Myth of 
     Continents_, I propose that these depictions of network 
     activity are embedded in unacknowledged and pernicious 
     "metageographies"--sign systems that organize 
     geographical knowledge into visual schemes that seem 
     straightforward (how else to illustrate global Internet 
     traffic if not on images of the globe?), but which 
     depend on historically-and politically-inflected 
     misrepresentation of underlying material conditions.  
     Those conditions are discernible in these maps, I 
     propose, only by a contrarian reading: a decentered
     regard by which the maps (and the very logic of mapping
     itself) may be seen to describe--*though only 
     indirectly*--an emerging, virtual "dark continent" 
     specific to our historical moment.  This new political-
     symbolic structure traverses and fragments prior
     political entities, even as it makes use of fantasies of
     national identity.--th


Lee Morrissey, "Derrida, Algeria, and 'Structure, Sign, 
and Play'"

   o Abstract: Now that, reportedly, "deconstruction... 
     is dead in literature departments today"--as Jeffrey 
     Nealon writes in _Double Reading: Postmodernism after 
     Deconstruction_--it may be possible to reconsider its 
     "birth," particularly the commonly accepted notion that 
     Derrida's work avoids, overlooks, or prevents a 
     relationship with history and/or politics (22).  By 
     considering Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" 
     (1966) in terms of the relationship between Paris and 
     Algeria or Francophone North Africa--what the recent 
     History of Structuralism calls "the continental divide
     of structuralism" (Dosse 264)--this essay argues that
     the recent focus on politics has been there from the 
     "beginning."  Where "Structure, Sign, and Play" 
     tentatively claims that "perhaps something has occurred 
     in the history of the concept of structure that could be 
     called an event," and answers the obvious question--
     "what would this event be then?"--with the cryptic claim 
     that "its exterior form would be that of a rupture" 
     (278), this essay, on the one hand, treats the Algerian
     liberation as that rupture, while on the other, 
     considering the cryptic, tentative tone of "Structure, 
     Sign, and Play" as symptomatic.  By "playing" with 
     Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" (1966) essay in 
     terms of the "liberation" of Algeria (c. 1962), what 
     emerges is a Derridean argument much more politically 
     and historically aware than his work is generally 
     thought to be, especially in the earlier essays.--am


Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, "Fleshing the Text: Greenaway's 
_Pillow Book_ and the Erasure of the Body"

   o Abstract: Peter Greenaway's incorporation of other art 
     forms in his films has become a trademark of the British 
     artist.  His references to, and uses of different media 
     within a work and across works make him a mixed-media 
     and multi-media artist.  Most critics have focused on 
     Greenaway's pastiche renderings of paintings by famous 
     artists.  More specifically, Greenaway's particular 
     brand of intertextuality and quotations of paintings 
     has been shown to be at the service of his own 
     reflections about cinema--a medium he proposes to 
     redefine. Greenaway has been called a self-conscious 
     "auteur" who makes art "out of ideas about art."  What 
     Greenaway redefines through his "art-about-art" is not
     simply cinema, but more broadly speaking, 
     *representationality* itself.  His references to art 
     history are but particular manifestations of his
     comprehensive investigation of what it *means* to
     represent.  His films and other art-works explore the 
     ways humanity has sought to represent itself and the 
     world--through images, objects, words, sounds, and 
     bodies.  My analysis focuses on two of these 
     representational means which Greenaway explores in his 
     1996 film, _The Pillow Book_: the written word and the 
     body.  I begin with an investigation of the Oedipal
     resonances of the story.  I then examine Greenaway's 
     portrayal of the written word by drawing from the work
     of David Abram--a meditation on the impact of the 
     phonetic alphabet on our perception of, and relation 
     to, our bodies and the "body" of the world.  The gradual 
     divorce of language from its natural referents--the 
     human body and the land--which Abram describes is, I 
     argue, analogous to the split of the Subject from 
     the totality of Being brought about by the Subject's
     entry into the symbolic.  Furthermore, this split is 
     also the central motif of the Oedipus legend--a mythical 
     construct which has served as the master narrative of 
     our particular patriarchal civilization.  In abandoning
     its roots in the living body of the Earth that nurtures
     it, this civilization has inscribed itself in a deadly 
     narrative of biospheric proportions.  I thus conclude 
     with an elucidation of the explicit references Greenaway 
     makes in the film to ecological concerns, and propose 
     that _The Pillow Book_ brings the written word and the 
     body together in a deadly embrace.--pwm


Robert Miklitsch, "Rock 'N' Theory: Autobiography, Cultural 
Studies, and the 'Death of Rock'"

   o Abstract: This essay is structured like a record--a 45,  
     to be exact.  While the A side provides an anecdotal and
     autobiographical take on the origins or "birth" of rock 
     (on the assumption that, as Robert Palmer writes, "the 
     best histories are... personal histories, informed by 
     the author's own experiences and passions" [_Rock & 
     Roll_11]), the B side examines the work of Lawrence 
     Grossberg, in particular his speculations about the 
     "death of rock," as an example or symptom of the limits 
     of critical theory when it comes into contact with that 
     %je ne sais quoi% that virtually defines popular 
     music ("It's only rock 'n' roll, but I like it, I like 
     it").  By way of a conclusion, the reprise offers some 
     remarks on the generational implications of the 
     discourse of the body in rock historiography as well as, 
     not so incidentally, some critical, self-reflexive 
     remarks on the limits of just the sort of auto-
     historical "story" that makes up the A side.--rm


Bruce Robbins, "Celeb-Reliance: Intellectuals, Celebrity, and 
Upward Mobility"

   o Abstract: Critiques of the so-called academic star 
     system, this essay argues, often confuse the genuine 
     injustices of the way academic labor is currently 
     organized (especially the most pressing of these, the 
     tendency toward a two-tiered structure of employment) 
     with matters of celebrity and intellectual influence 
     that are related to it only very tangentially.  These 
     critiques also rely, strangely, on the meritocratic 
     presuppositions of the seemingly discredited ideology 
     of self-reliance.  My own critique of the anti-celebrity
     critics tries to understand confusions about celebrity 
     as expressions of a deeper and more general ambivalence
     about self-reliance and upward mobility.  To that end, 
     it discusses the role of the patron/mediator in the 
     self-reliance tales of Horatio Alger (an erotically 
     ambiguous figure who reflects the split of interests 
     and causes that go into the hero's rise) along with 
     mediation by the media itself in the case of celebrity 
     Oprah Winfrey.  Both cases, the essay proposes, are 
     about the articulation of social forces (rather than 
     individual merit) that determine the protagonist's rise.  
     And in both cases, that rise turns out to be about the 
     nature of the society risen into.  The essay concludes, 
     finally, that the most pertinent backdrop and causal 
     context for these upward mobility narratives, if a 
     paradoxical one, is the rise of the social welfare 
     state, which is also the proper target of efforts to 
     improve the situation of academic labor.--br