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 3, Number 3 (May, 1993) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran
John Unsworth, Issue Editor
Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: Nancy Cooke
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Assistants: Jonathan Beasley
John Hoback
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, and instructions for CONTENTS.593
retrieving files
Roberto Maria Dainotto, "The Excremental Sublime: DAINOTTO.593
The Postmodern Literature of Blockage and Release"
Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and HELMLING.593
Eagleton"
Eric Selinger, "It Meant I Loved: Louise Gluck's SELINGER.593
_Ararat_"
"Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation ANTIN.593
with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean"
Nathaniel Bobbitt, "Xenakis Letters" BOBBITT.593
George Aichele, "Reading Beyond Meaning" AICHELE.593
Kip Canfield, "The Microstructure of CANFIELD.593
Logocentrism: Sign Models in Derrida and
Smolensky"
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Susan Suleiman, "Can You Go Home Again? POP-CULT.593
A Budapest Diary, 1992"
REVIEWS:
Tim Watson, "Comrade Gramsci's Progeny." REVIEW-1.593
Review of Antonio Gramsci, _Prison Notebooks,
vol. 1_, David Harris, _From Class Struggle
to the Politics of Pleasure_, and Renate Holub,
_Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism_.
J. Russell Perkin, "Theorizing the Culture REVIEW-2.593
Wars." Review of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., _Loose
Canons_, Gerald Graff, _Beyond the Culture Wars_,
and William V. Spanos, _The End of Education_.
Leslie Regan Shade, "Women and Television." REVIEW-3.593
Review of Lynn Spigel, _Make Room for TV_,
and Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, eds., _Private
Screenings_.
Debra Silverman, "Playing With Clothes." REVIEW-4.593
Review of Marjorie Garber, _Vested Interests_.
Simon Carter, "Risk and the New Modernity." REVIEW-5.593
Review of Ulrich Bech, _Risk Society_.
Eric Rabkin, "CyFy PoMo?" Review of David REVIEW-6.593
Ketterer, _Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy_
and Larry McCaffery, _Storming the Reality Studio_.
Lahoucine Ouzgane, "Women and Islam." Review REVIEW-7.593
of Leila Ahmed, _Women and Gender in Islam_.
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Roberto Maria Dainotto, "The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern
Literature of Blockage and Release"
ABSTRACT: Concerned primarily with American fiction, this
essay reflects on the sublime as the defining feature of
postmodern literature and discourse. From Longinus to Kant,
the sublime, a complexly aesthetic and social category at
once, has been described as the individual's confrontation
with a superior force that momentarily marks the disruption
of the subject, which is later reconstituted in a state of
sublime ecstasy and self-reaffirmation. From its very
outset, postmodern literature partakes of this paradigm: the
"exhaustion" of literary possibilities considered by John
Barth, as well as the "loss of the self" announced by Wylie
Sypher, present a "momentary check" to a postmodern
imagination which has to confront a tantalizing modernist
literary tradition and a totalizing social order--a check
that will be ironically overcome at the very moment a newly
reconstituted subject will be able to "replenish" literature
with new tropes, new stories, fictions, and fables of
identity. In the end, postmodern imagination and
individuality will come out "sublimated" into a new
position, alternative to traditional aesthetics and
metaphysics, as left-overs, excrements of the symbolic order
of both society and literature. --RD
Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton"
ABSTRACT: A study of how Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton
differ on the issue of "pleasure," with special attention to
the relation between their substantive differences and the
textual effects (satisfactions, or "pleasures") of their
very different prose styles. Jameson's prose enacts a
"vision" of "inevitable failure" that, Jameson argues, is
incumbent, generically, on any "dialectical" criticism as
such; Eagleton scorns any "defeatist" or "pessimistic"
rhetoric, yet slyly recommends Jameson's tortured writing
precisely for the "profound pleasure" it offers. How does
(or should) "pleasure" manifest in Marxist writing?
Jameson's "Pleasure: A Political Issue" proposes (via a
reading of Barthes's _Pleasure of the Text_) a redescription
of Marxist pleasure as a version of "the sublime," but in
the process inverts some hallowed Marxist themes, while
Eagleton's manifesto for a "Marxist theory of comedy" in
"Carnival and Comedy: Bakhtin and Brecht" unexpectedly
founders on a pessimism at odds with Eagleton's avowed
"optimism of the will." Such tensions and contradictions
indicate the limits, the possibilities and predicaments, of
the rhetorical or libidinal resources available to Marxist
critique in our historical moment. --SH
Eric Selinger, "It Meant I Loved: Louise Gluck's _Ararat_"
ABSTRACT: According to Kristeva, an "erosion" of
imaginary paternity has undermined contemporary love. In
its uneasy family portraits, Louise Gluck's _Ararat_ traces
one speaker's progress out of this postmodern melancholy.
Rather than replace the old codes of romance with the
"work-in-progress" of imaginative play, Gluck embraces a
cycle of idealization, disappointment, and forgiveness.
Pressing her language to a dry, antipoetic limit she turns
the plot of a mass-media lament into memorable and
particular verse. --ES
"Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation with Hazel
Smith and Roger Dean"
ABSTRACT: An edited transcript of an interview with
David Antin by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, in San Diego,
February 1992. In the interview, Antin talks about
language, art, thought, and the methods and principles of
his verbal improvisation. The interview took place shortly
after a performance by Antin in San Francisco, on the
subject of _the other_. --[ed.]
George Aichele, "Reading Beyond Meaning"
ABSTRACT: The traditional logocentric understanding of
text is a theological one; it is the "theology of the Text"
(Derrida) which postmodern %differance% refuses. A
postmodern theology of reading does not view text as a
"work" or property, governed by an ethics and an economics,
ideal meaning incarnated in various bodies. Instead, text
is uncovered as a material thing, formed of meaningless
letters, on which readers violently impose meaning. Three
limit-conditions which define reading are the non-reader
(Calvino), literal translation (Benjamin), and materialist
reading (Barthes, Belo). These point toward a concrete
theology, a "reading against the grain," which can never be
completely realized. --GA
Kip Canfield, "The Microstructure of Logocentrism:
Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky"
ABSTRACT: This paper explores a remarkable parallelism
in stories about the theory of the sign in the usually
isolated discourses of the humanities and the cognitive
sciences. It presents a close reading of two works,
"Linguistics and Grammatology," Chapter 2 of _Of
Grammatology_ by Jacques Derrida, and "On the proper
treatment of connectionism" by Paul Smolensky. Both Derrida
and Smolensky want to give a fuller, more complex, and
dynamic vision of the signifying human. Smolensky
explicitly appeals to presence as a field in dynamic systems
theory. Derrida precisely defines such a field with the
terms "trace" and "differance," but denies their reality
because he rejects the idea of global control over all the
atoms of signification. The fundamental target of these
critiques is the static character of structuralist or
objectivist accounts of signification. Both authors also
note a semantic problem for sign models that requires a
mysterious "semantic shift" from the unconscious to the
conscious. This semantic anomaly does not allow intuitive
access to the basis of the sign model. Derrida sees this as
an insurmountable mystery while Smolensky thinks it can be
penetrated. --KC
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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) 1993 by
_Postmodern Culture_ and Oxford University Press, 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
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requires the written consent of the editors and of the publisher.
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