POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE
P RNCU REPO ODER E P O S T M O D E R N
P TMOD RNCU U EP S ODER ULTU E C U L T U R E
P RNCU UR OS ODER ULTURE
P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER ULTU E an electronic journal
P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER E of interdisciplinary
POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE criticism
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Volume 2, Number 3 (May, 1992) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran
John Unsworth, Issue Editor
Book Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: Nancy Cooke
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Assistant: Mina Javaher
Editorial Board:
Kathy Acker Chimalum Nwankwo
Sharon Bassett Patrick O'Donnell
Michael Berube Elaine Orr
Marc Chenetier Marjorie Perloff
Greg Dawes David Porush
R. Serge Denisoff Mark Poster
Robert Detweiler Carl Raschke
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mike Reynolds
Joe Gomez Avital Ronell
Robert Hodge Andrew Ross
bell hooks Jorge Ruffinelli
E. Ann Kaplan Susan M. Schultz
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos
Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart
Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum
Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer
Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer
Phil Novak
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CONTENTS
AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT
Masthead, Contents, Abstracts, CONTENTS 592
Instructions for retrieving files
Russell A. Potter, "Edward Schizohands: POTTER 592
The Postmodern Gothic Body"
Fred Pfeil, "Revolting Yet Conserved: Family PFEIL 592
%Noir% in _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_"
Tessa Dora Addison and Audrey Extavasia, ADD-EXT 592
"Fucking (With Theory) for Money: Toward
an Interrogation of Escort Prostitution"
Rochelle Owens, "Drum and Whistle" and OWENS 592
"Black Stems," Two Poems from _LUCA:
Discourse on Life & Death_
Donald F. Theall, "Beyond the Orality/Literacy THEALL 592
Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History
of Cyberspace"
Walter Kalaidjian, "Mainlining Postmodernism: KALAIDJI 592
Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and the Art
of Intervention"
Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and MCCARTHY 592
Perversity: Scientism and Sadism"
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Cathy Griggers, "Lesbian Bodies in the Age of POP-CULT 592
(Post)Mechanical Reproduction"
REVIEWS:
Terry Collins, "The Vietnam War, Reascendant REVIEW-1 592
Conservatism, White Victims," review of
_The Vietnam War and American Culture_, ed.
John Carlos and Rick Berg, and _Fourteen
Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War
Literature_, ed. Philip K. Jason.
Michael W. Foley, review of _Post-Modernism REVIEW-2 592
and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads,
and Intrusions_, by Pauline Marie Rosenau.
Ursula K. Heise, "Becoming Postmodern?" REVIEW-3 592
review of _Sequel to History: Postmodernism
and the Crisis of Representational Time_, by
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth.
Edward M. Jennings, "The Text is Dead; Long REVIEW-4 592
Live The Techst," review of _Hypertext: The
Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory
and Technology_, by George P. Landow.
Matthew Mancini, review of _Thinking Across REVIEW-5 592
the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect,
and the New Pragmatism_, by Giles Gunn.
Meryl Altman and Keith Nightenhelser, review of REVIEW-6 592
_Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks
to Freud_, by Thomas Laqueur.
Mark Poster, review of _Michel Foucault_, by REVIEW-7 592
Didier Eribon.
Linda Ray Pratt, "Speaking in Tongues: Dead REVIEW-8 592
Elvis and the Greil Quest," review of
_Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural
Obsession_, by Greil Marcus.
Rei Terada, "The Pressures of Merely REVIEW-9 592
Sublimating," review of _American Sublime:
The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre_, by Rob
Wilson.
Announcements and Advertizements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Russell A. Potter, "Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic
Body"
ABSTRACT: In the conjunction between the gothic body
of Edward in Tim Burton's film _Edward Scissorhands_ and the
anti-Oedipal Body without Organs in Deleuze and Guattari's
_Anti-Oedipus_, this essay posits a common machine, that of
the fragmentary, persecuting Gothic body. Whether in James
Whale's 1931 film _Frankenstein_ or in 1991's _Body Parts_,
the partial body appears again and again as the persecuting
agent of a society founded upon the monolithically Oedipal
nuclear family. This constitution of this body, with its
scars and sutures, is in fact fundamentally Anti-Oedipal;
when organs do not stay in place, where is an erogenous zone
to go? This essay thus offers a reading not only of _Edward
Scissorhands_ and its filmic and novelistic precursors, but
also of the postmodern suburbanity which beings from
Frankenstein to Edward continue to invade. --RAP
Fred Pfeil, "Revolting Yet Conserved: Family %Noir% in _Blue
Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_"
ABSTRACT: In the new Hollywood, quintessential site of
the intersection between the flexible specialization of
post-Fordist production and the free-floating
ideologemes-turned-syntax of postmodernism, the
transgressive energies and subversive formal practices that
first animated and defined %film noir% may be most alive and
well in a new and even perverse combination with other
similarly deracinated formal and thematic elements from
other ex- genres of film. In contrast to classic %noir%,
which was non- or even anti-domestic, this newer %noir%
includes, and indeed is centered on, home and family, even
as it decenters and problematizes both. Through a look at
two successful recent films, _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator
2_, I mean to show how home and family are being
destabilized, "%noir%-ized" in both--dissolved into a semic
flow or play of boundaries from which, paradoxically, those
same categories re-emerge with renewed half-life. --FP
Tessa Dora Addison and Audrey Extavasia, "Fucking (With Theory)
for Money: Toward an Interrogation of Escort Prostitution"
ABSTRACT: This essay is intended as an introductory
interrogation of the terrain of escort prostitution,
mobilizing terms from both _The Telephone Book_ by Avital
Ronell and _A Thousand Plateaus_ by Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari. --TDA & AE
Donald F. Theall, "Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James
Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace"
ABSTRACT: _Finnegans Wake_ articulates a radical
modernist or postmodernist theory of poetics and
communication, based on gesture and tactility, essential to
understanding cyberspace and the limitations of the
orality/literacy dichotomy. Joyce's impact upon theorists
like Derrida, Eco, or McLuhan contributes to understanding
the development of VR out of electromechanical technologies
and high modernism. --DFT
Walter Kalaidjian, "Mainlining Postmodernism: Jenny Holzer,
Barbara Kruger, and the Art of Intervention"
ABSTRACT: Taking up the "new times" of postmodernity,
this essay considers the political resources and limits of
cultural critique afforded by Kruger's appropriation of
advertising signage and Holzer's work in light emitting
diode board technology, both within museum culture and at
street level. The essay compares their interventions to the
more communal, socioaesthetic praxes of Greenpeace and ACT
UP. --WK
Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity: Scientism and
Sadism"
ABSTRACT: The project of this essay is to provide a
theoretical basis for ethical-political resistance to
postmodern perversity. Through a comparison of Deleuze &
Guattari's (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus_ to de Sade's
prototypical deconstructionism, this essay traces the nature
and consequences of the circulation of desire in a
postmodern order of things (an order implicitly modeled on a
repressed archetype of the new physics' fluid particle
flows), and it reveals a complicity between scientism, which
underpins the postmodern condition, and the sadism of
incessant deconstruction, which heightens the intensity of
the pleasure-seeking moment in postmodernism. --PM
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COPYRIGHT: Unless otherwise noted, copyrights for the texts which
comprise this issue of _Postmodern Culture_ are held by their
authors. The compilation as a whole is Copyright (c) 1992 by
_Postmodern Culture_, all rights reserved. Items published by
_Postmodern Culture_ may be freely shared among individuals, but
they may not be republished in any medium without express written
consent from the author(s) and advance notification of the
editors. Issues of _Postmodern Culture_ may be archived for
public use in electronic or other media, as long as each issue is
archived in its entirety and no fee is charged to the user; any
exception to this restriction requires the written consent of the
editors of _Postmodern Culture_.
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