CONTENTS 

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Lili Hsieh, Romance in the Age of Cybernetic 
Conviviality: Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise and the Poetics of 
Postcolonial Translation
					
Orit Halpern, Anagram, Gestalt, Game in Maya Deren: 
Reconfiguring the Image in Post-war Cinema

Paul Stephens, Self-Portrait in a Context Mirror: 
Pain and Quotation in the Conceptual Writing 
of Craig Dworkin  

Michael Harrison, The Queer Spaces and Fluid 
Bodies of Nazario’s Anarcoma     

Grzegorz Wroblewski, three poems, translated 
from the Polish by Agnieszka Pokojska


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                      Reviews
 
Patrick F. Durgin, Matches, in Our Time. A review of 
Carla Harryman, _Adorno’s Noise_. Ithaca, NY: Essay 
Press, 2008. 
 

Alessandro Porco, “Time is Illmatic”: A Critical 
Retrospective on Nas’s Groundbreaking Debut. A review 
of Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai (eds.), _Born to 
Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic_. New York: Basic Civitas, 
2009. 
	
Ken Hillis, From Capital to Karma: James Cameron’s Avatar. 
Dir. James Cameron. 20th Century Fox, 2009.  

Vicki Callahan, Liu’s Ethics of the Database. A review of 
Alan Liu, _Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern 
Historicism and the Database_. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 
2008. Print.


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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Orit Halpern, Anagram, Gestalt, Game in Maya Deren: 
Reconfiguring the Image in Post-war Cinema

    * Abstract: This article examines the relationship between 
the film work of American Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and 
Cold-war science, particularly the sciences of Gestalt psychology, 
cybernetics, game theory, and anthropology. The central concern is 
to link Deren’s investment in time and in transforming the 
cinematic image with contemporaneous developments in science, 
technology, and politics. Using her engagement with the 
cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson as a frame, the 
essay demonstrates that Deren’s attitude to temporality and 
representation is both similar to and radically different from that 
emerging in psychology, anthropology, communication science and 
game theory after the war. This cinema excavates the probabilistic 
and reflexive nature of time, as understood in both art and 
science during this period, to create new associations between 
subjects, screens, and life. However, Deren’s work produces 
associations and potentials that the game theories and technologies 
with which she is concerned do not. Her work utilizes the 
discourse of temporality and representation taken from these 
sciences, while refusing to repeat without difference, and so 
blocking a return to older discourses of objectivity, authority, 
and knowledge. --oh 

Michael Harrison, The Queer Spaces and Fluid Bodies of Nazario’s 
Anarcoma   

    * Abstract: At a time when Spanish culture was attempting to 
emerge from the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship, a generation 
of queer artists used comics to comment on the time’s significant 
cultural changes. This essay examines the original queer 
sensibility of the comic Anarcoma, by Nazario, as a symbol of the 
changes that were happening all over post-Franco Spain. Centering 
on the exploits of the titular transsexual detective, Anarcoma 
takes the cultural and sexual expectations inherited from 
franquismo and queers them, resulting in a new set of images 
which can be associated with democratic Spain.               

With its distinct visual representations, Anarcoma refigures 
gendered and sexual bodies while navigating real Barcelona spaces. 
This use of urban space rhetorically ties the boundary crossing of 
Anarcoma as a fictional individual with the developments and 
changes in the gay community of Barcelona and in Spain at large. 
An analysis of the specific spaces and how they are refigured and 
linked to the body of Anarcoma serves to reflect the development 
of gay identity in Spain. The fluid body of the detective, 
visually tied to masculinity and femininity, sometimes 
simultaneously, elucidates the way gender is presented in comics 
and shows how questions of gender and gender norms figure 
prominently in the nascent gay movement of Spain.  A further 
analysis of the comic’s secondary characters also highlights 
this queering of the norms through the further abstraction of 
coded images of gender. --mh                                  
                                                             
Lili Hsieh, Romance in the Age of Cybernetic Conviviality: Hsia 
Yü’s Pink Noise and the Poetics of Postcolonial Translation 

    * Abstract: In 2007, acclaimed Taiwanese postmodern poet Hsia 
Yü published a transparent book of bilingual poems generated mostly 
from weblogs (in English) and from a computer translation program 
(in Chinese). The book, Pink Noise (now available on Amazon), has 
ignited enthusiastic responses among Hsia Yü’s “lay readers” in 
Taiwan, but like many other postmodernist works from a postcolonial 
context, has not yet received much critical attention. The essay 
begins with the question of locating or localizing Hsia Yü’s 
postmodernism in postcolonial, post-Martial-Law Taiwan, reading 
the form of layered transparency and the play with (artificial) 
language and (machinic) translation not as a free play of 
signifiers or equivalent of concrete or conceptual art but as a 
realistic representation of digital (uneven) globalization. 
Reading Hsia Yü’s bilingual poems closely through Lacan’s theory 
of alienation and Wittgenstein’s ideas on nonsense, the essay 
shows that the English/Weblish and the Chinese/Translationese can 
be read as different kinds of language games which are signposts 
to the questions concerning the status of English as a global 
language, the loss and love of translation in a postcolonial 
context, the return from narratology to a musicology of poetry, 
and the tremendously rich “nonsense” that happens when two h
eterogeneous and disparagingly hegemonic national languages 
meet. In conclusion, Pink Noise, unlike modernism with its 
implicit claim to whiteness, trans-lates negative dialogics 
into a convivial romance of poetry. --lh
	
Paul Stephens, Self-Portrait in a Context Mirror: Pain 
and Quotation in the Conceptual Writing of Craig Dworkin


    * Abstract: This essay explores the role of quotation in 
the writing of the poet-critic Craig Dworkin. Dworkin's “Dure,” 
an ekphrastic prose poem concerning a Dürer self-portrait, is a 
complex meditation on selfhood, the representation of pain, and 
the nature of linguistic appropriation. “Dure” demonstrates that 
an appropriative, heavily quotational poetics can enact a 
process of therapeutic self-critique. To the postauthorial (and 
posthistorical) malaise of Barthes’s “the text is a tissue of 
quotations,” Dworkin responds with a self-portrait in a tissue 
of quotations, enacting a writing cure, or a writing-through 
cure. Extensively quotational works are often associated with 
parody and satire—but such works, this essay suggests, can also 
be sincere in intent, and can mourn, as well as heal, by 
thematizing intersubjectivity. Although Dworkin elsewhere 
advocates a poetics “of intellect rather than emotion,” this 
essay claims that “Dure” enacts something along the lines of a 
return to expressive autobiography, somewhat paradoxically by 
way of a poetics of citationality. --ps