CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

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

Hanjo Berressem, "Serres Reads Pynchon / Pynchon Reads Serres"

David Herman, "Sciences of the Text" 

Lee Spinks, "Genesis and Structure and the Object of 
Postmodernism" 

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



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                       Review Essay

Joel Nickels, "Post-Avant-Gardism: Bob Perelman and the Dialectic
of Futural Memory." A review of Bob Perelman, _The Future of 
Memory_. New York: Roof Books, 1998. 



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                          Reviews

Brian Finney, "Will Self's Transgressive Fictions." A review of 
Will Self, _Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys_. London:
Bloomsbury, 1998. 

Robert S. Oventile, "Paul de Man, Now More than Ever?" A review
of Tom Cohen, et al., eds., _Material Events: Paul de Man and the 
Afterlife of Theory_. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 

Rebecca Rauve, "The Novel: Awash in Media Flows." A review of 
John Johnston, _Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the
Age of Media Saturation_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. 

Lasse Thomassen, "The Politics of Lack." A review of Slavoj
Zizek, _The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political 
Ontology_.  London: Verso, 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


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

    o Abstract: At a time when the law considers "that a 
      compelling claim of innocence is [not] alone grounds for 
      federal intervention,"  what mighthave 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"

    o 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 [WWW Version Only]. 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" 

    o 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" 

    o 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"

    o 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