CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Evans Chan, "Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema"

James D. Faubion, "Hieros Gamos: Typology and the Fate of 
Passion"

Steven Helmling, "Failure and the Sublime: Fredric Jameson's 
Writing in the '80s"

Lawrence Johnson, "Tracing Calculation [Calque Calcul] 
Between Nicholas Abraham and Jacques Derrida"

Jim Rosenberg, "A Prosody of Space / Non-Linear Time"



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                          Reviews

Genevieve Abravanel, "Disciplining Culture." A review of John Carlos 
Rowe, ed., _"Culture" and the Problem of Disciplines_.  New York: 
Columbia UP, 1998. 

David Anshen, "Specters of the Real." A review of Michael Sprinker, 
ed., _Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's "Specters of 
Marx"_. New York: Verso, 1999. 

Brian Baker, "In the Post: or, the Work of Art in the Age of Digital 
Simulation." A review of _Heaven_, an exhibition of postmodern art 
curated by Dorit Le Vitte Harten. The Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany, 30 
July 1999-17 October 1999, and the Tate Gallery to the North, Liverpool, 
U.K., 9 December 1999-27 February 2000. 

Timothy Gray, "Periodizing Postmodernism." A review of Patricia 
Juliana Smith, ed., _The Queer Sixties_. New York: Routledge, 1999, and 
Stephen Miller, _The Seventies Now:  Culture as Surveillance_. Durham: 
Duke UP, 1999. 

Kevin Marzahl, "Limited Affinities." A review of Rachel Blau DuPlessis 
and Peter Quartermain, eds., _The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural 
Poetics_. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999. 

David Pagano, "The Openness of an Immanent Temporality." A review of 
E.A. Grosz, _Becomings: Explorations of Time, Memory, and Futures_. 
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. 


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                          Related Readings
 			 [WWW Version Only]

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                          Bibliography of
                           Postmodernism
                        and Critical Theory
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                              Notices
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                        Notes on Contributors

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                             Abstracts


Evans Chan, "Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema"

    o Abstract: "Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema" charts the
      postmodern condition as it pertains to Hong Kong and its
      film industry. It defines the post-coloniality of Hong Kong
      (and China) as being still trapped within the realm of
      Habermasean modernity--unfulfilled liberalization in, at
      least, formal political terms. At the confluence of East
      and West in the age of late capitalism, Hong Kong
      inevitably has its share of eclectic postmodern glitz.
      However, the postmodern pastiche aesthetics of Hong Kong
      films may be a reflection, firstly, of the city's
      longstanding status as the "Hollywood of the East," with
      its voracious borrowing from Hollywood hits and traditional
      genre (horror, kungfu) films; and, secondly, of colonial
      Hong Kong's gradual awakening to its post-war cosmopolitan
      status, which is permeated with a sense of distinct and
      separate identity from mainland China. The essay traces the
      formation of the contemporary Hong Kong identity to the
      late '60s when the Cultural Revolution echoed on the
      streets of the colony, planting a deep-seated fear of
      communism and creating the first major exodus. As
      postmodernism's sexuality agenda has opened its arms to,
      and bestowed respectability on, a series of Chinese films
      on gay subjects in the film festival circuit, the taste of
      Western urbanites for ethnic spectacle has contributed to
      Hong Kong cinema's underground popularity. The appeal of
      Hong Kong cinema has also been boosted by the drama of the
      colony's historic hand-over by Britain to China in July
      1997, which in itself epitomizes the visibility and
      invisibility of Hong Kong--a completely passive, mute
      subject of an event that puts the finishing touches to the
      saga of Euro-imperialism. The essay analyzes the
      Anglo-American media's ideologically-charged discourse on
      Hong Kong's decolonization and its representation in Wayne
      Wang's _The Chinese Box_; the meta-narrative of 1997
      angst--intensified by the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989--that
      runs through the corpus of Tsui Hark, Hong Kong's action
      film auteur par excellence; and Hong Kong cinema's
      postmodern nostalgia mode (Stephen Chiau, Wong Kar-wai,
      Stanley Kwan, etc.) that emerged in the late 80's. Also
      discussed are the causes of Hong Kong cinema's seemingly
      inevitable demise--absorption by Hollywood and the siege of
      piracy--and the subtle signs of post-colonial Hong Kong's
      erosion as a civil society ruled by law. Citing Habermas,
      Jameson, Eagleton, and others, the essay contemplates the
      possibilities and options of postmodern politics by way of
      the unique situation of Hong Kong and its cinema. Lastly,
      the author, who is one of the few independent filmmakers
      Hong Kong has produced and is today based jointly in New
      York and Hong Kong, reflects on the creative trajectory of
      his own work as informed by displacement, his ethnicity,
      and postmodernity.--ec
     
James D. Faubion, "Hieros Gamos: Typology and the Fate of 
Passion"

    o Abstract: Contemporary theories of identity-formation tend
      to vacillate between two equally unsatisfactory
      resolutions: determinism and decisionism. That they do so
      belies the shortcomings of the question from which they
      typically proceed: Do we, or do we not, choose to be who we
      are? Its shortcomings can be brought out more clearly by
      posing another, closely related question: Do we choose to
      love? The answer to the latter is plainly negative. Yet it
      is far from entailing pure passivity. It directs us instead
      to attend to the reflexive assessment and narrative 
      articulation of personal experience. It directs us further
      to attend to the inevitably interpersonal ethical
      pedagogies from which any definition of the self and its
      relations to others must derive its methods, its
      substantive themes, and its legitimacy. The story which Amo
      Paul Bishop Roden has gradually fashioned of her love for
      George Roden--the heir-apparent of the Branch Davidians, a
      small religious community established on a prairie compound
      called Mount Carmel near Waco, Texas--is a richly
      illustrative case in point. It offers us a double object
      lesson: one, in the Bible's enduring and complex service as
      a technology of self-creation and self-transformation;
      another, more disturbing, in contemporary processes of
      experiential and ethical colonization.--jdf

Steven Helmling, "Failure and the Sublime: Fredric Jameson's 
Writing in the '80s"

    o Abstract: In _The Political Unconscious_ (1981), Fredric
      Jameson prescribes a "vision" of "inevitable failure" for
      Marxist critique--for how can critique succeed when the
      revolutionary tradition itself is failing? In his 1984
      "Postmodernism" essay, however, Jameson protests the
      "winner loses logic" this prescription entails; he goes on
      to mobilize "the sublime" as a figure for several
      "postmodern" problematics. This essay considers Jameson's
      "sublime" as an implicit "response" to the "winner loses
      logic" Jameson had earlier boxed himself into. Both
      thematically, and as a "textual effect" of his writing
      practice, Jameson evokes a "sublime" bearing inflections
      from Burke and Kant through Hegel, Freud, and beyond, in
      such a way as to make "the sublime" both a figure for the
      predicaments of critique, and a "neutralization" of them.
      Hence the essay allowed more scope for the utopian
      thematics of theory than had been usual in Jameson--or than
      would be present in his later reconsiderations of
      postmodernism.--sh

Lawrence Johnson, "Tracing Calculation [Calque Calcul] 
Between Nicholas Abraham and Jacques Derrida"

    o Abstract: This essay is broadly concerned with the role of
      death in recent philosophical-theoretical activity: both
      the concept of death and the deaths of philosophers
      themselves. Its specific focus is the way in which the
      death of Nicholas Abraham in 1975 has contributed to the
      subsequent uses of his theoretical approaches to mourning,
      incorporation, and loss. In particular, it considers
      Jacques Derrida's efforts toward gaining belated
      (posthumous) recognition for the work of his friend. Much
      of Derrida's work (certainly in the mid-1970s, and
      subsequently in varying degrees) represents an
      incorporation of the theory of incorporation.

      This incorporation is "traced" through three texts that are
      directly related, yet separated by the threshold of
      Abraham's passing. These texts are _Glas_ and the two
      interviews given in 1975 and published as "Between Brackets
      I" and "Ja, or the faux-bond II" in _Points_. The interviews
      reflect upon _Glas_ but also foreshadow Derrida's
      reminiscences of his deceased friend in his foreword to
      Abraham and Maria Torok's _Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de
      l'Homme aux Loups_ in 1976. By reading these texts as
      expressions of the crossing of a threshold, we find that
      _Glas_ itself, though written before Abraham's death, may be
      seen as having shaped Derrida's incorporation of
      incorporation (in advance, as it were) which in turn has
      impacted on the reception of Abraham's work. _Glas_'s pivotal
      role becomes clear when we consider some of the ways its
      "calculations" include fragments of a project that Abraham
      himself had always intended to keep hidden: his early
      _Glossary of Paradigmatics_, and its centrepiece, the entry
      "calque." --lj

Jim Rosenberg, "A Prosody of Space / Non-Linear Time"

    o Abstract: Prosody is the charting of sound phenomena as
      they occur in a poem, normally yielding a linear time-plot
      of sound events. How should prosody work in non-linear
      poetry, e.g., hypertext? We begin with a recasting of the
      stereotype approach to metrics as a pattern-matching
      process, attaching to the poem iterated templates chosen
      from an a priori set in advance of the poem. "Foot" is
      shown as ambiguous: it may refer to one of the templates or
      an actual metrical unit of syllables in the poem matched by
      a template. To avoid baggage associated with the a priori,
      we construct a new basis for linear prosody based on
      bonding strength, the attachment of a syllable to the one
      ahead or behind it. The unit of meter in the poem
      itself--with no a priori entanglements--stems from
      clustering based on bonding strength.

      Bonding strength is really a spatial concept (in one
      dimension, space and time are nearly the same thing), and
      thus works in any topology. A non-linear prosody may be
      constructed spatially. We review the concept of hypertext
      episode, as a group of iterated small activations that
      cohere in the reader's mind. Bonding strength works within
      and through the episode.

      The most difficult issues for non-linear prosody concern
      time. Outside of the lexia there is no straightforward
      concept of time. We discuss first how time works inside the
      episode, then how time works among episodes. Time units may
      be equivalenced or form clear alternative sets. Localized
      units of time are spatially anchored and spatially related.
      Overall, in a non-linear poem there are time stretches
      which may be disengaged from one another. Clustering and
      bonding strength may work to form a framework for
      interrelating disengaged fragments of time.

      Finally we consider multiuser time.--jr