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 6, Number 3 (May, 1996) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran
Lisa Brawley
Stuart Moulthrop, issue editor
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Jim English
Paula Geyh
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
List Manager: Jessamy Town
Editorial Board:
Sharon Bassett Phil Novak
Michael Berube Chimalum Nwankwo
Nahum Chandler Patrick O'Donnell
Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr
Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff
J. Yellowlees Douglas Fred Pfeil
Graham Hammill Peggy Phelan
Phillip Brian Harper David Porush
David Herman Mark Poster
bell hooks Carl Raschke
E. Ann Kaplan Avital Ronell
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz
Arthur Kroker William Spanos
Neil Larsen Tony Stewart
Tan Lin Allucquere Roseanne Stone
Saree Makdisi Gary Lee Stonum
Jerome McGann Chris Straayer
Uppinder Mehan Rei Terada
Jim Morrison Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykata Greg Ulmer
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CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
Stephen A. Fredman, "'How to Get fredman.596
Out of the Room That Is the Book?'
Paul Auster and the Consequences
of Confinement"
Scott Schaffer, "Disney and the schaffer.596
Imagineering of Histories"
Wes Chapman, "Male Pro-Feminism chapman.596
and the Masculinist Gigantism of
_Gravity's Rainbow_"
Charles Shepherdson, "The shepherdson.596
Intimate Alterity of the Real"
Adrian Miles, "Hyperweb" [WWW Version only]
(hypertext)
Chris Semansky, "Youngest Brother semansky.596
of Brothers"
Cory Brown, "My Name in Water," brown.596
"Adumbration," "Offering," and
"Depth Perception"
RELATED READINGS [WWW Version only]
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Andrew McMurry, "The Slow pop-cult.596
Apocalypse: A Gradualist Theory
of the World's Demise"
REVIEWS:
James Berger, "Ends and Means: review-1.596
Theorizing Apocalypse in the 1990's."
Review of Lee Quinby, _Anti-Apocalypse:
Exercises in Genealogical Criticism_
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994),
Stephen D. O'Leary, _Arguing the
Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial
Rhetoric_, (New York: Oxford UP, 1994),
Richard Dellamora, _Apocalyptic
Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense
of an Ending_ (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
1994).
Kenneth Sherwood, "A Millennial Poetics." review-2.596
Review of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre
Joris, eds., _Poems for the Millennium:
The University of California Book of Modern
and Postmodern Poetry (Volume One: From Finde
Sie'cle to Negritude)_. Berkeley U of
California P, 1995.
Joe Amato, "Personal Effects, Public Effects, review-3.596
Special Effects: Institutionalizing American
Poetry." Review of Jed Rasula, _The
American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects,
1940-1990_. National Council of Teachers of
English.
Anjali Arondekar, "The Problem of Strategy: review-4.596
How to Read Race, Gender, and Class in the
Colonial Context." Review of Anne McClintock,
_Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality
in the Colonial Contest_. New York:
Routledge, 1995.
Kelly Cresap, "Bisexuals, Cyborgs, and review-5.596
Chaos." Review of Marjorie Garber, _Vice
Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of
Everyday Life_. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995.
Mark Shadle, "Schama and the New Histories of review-6.596
Landscape." Review of Simon Schama,
_Landscape and Memory_. New York: A.A.
Knopf, 1995.
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.596
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Stephen Fredman, "'How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book?':
Paul Auster and the Consequences of Confinement"
ABSTRACT: In his novels, poetry, and memoir, Paul Auster
explores a primary image of "the room of the book," which
figures the space of writing as a place where life and
writing meet in an unstable, creative, and sometimes
dangerous encounter. Focusing especially on _The Invention
of Solitude_, this essay examines the room of the book
through three interpretive frameworks that help to make its
dimensions apprehensible. These frameworks represent
dynamic issues that arise from within the room of the book,
issues that account for some of the characteristic
complexities of Auster's work: 1) a contest between prose
and poetry that colors much of his writing; 2) a
parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity that he
constructs with great effort; and 3) a pervasive
preoccupation with Holocaust imagery. Auster's room of the
book houses a fascinating struggle between the absolutizing
qualities of poetry and the narrative investment in
fictional characters; it functions for the male writer both
as a site of retreat from engagement with women and as an
alchemical retort in which a parthenogenic theory of
creativity can be proposed; and it becomes a space of
hiding and torment, in which the irresolvable problems of
writing with reference to the Holocaust can be embodied.
In Auster's prose, the postmodern inquiry into the
relationship between writing and identity metamorphoses
into a confrontation with a series of gender issues,
oriented around the father, and then metamorphoses again
into an interrogation of the particularly Jewish concern
with memory. Using memory to probe the ruptures in
contemporary life, Auster returns ultimately to the
unspeakable memories of the Holocaust, thus laying bare
ways in which the postmodern is inescapably post-Holocaust.
-SF
Scott Schaffer, "Disney and the Imagineering of Histories"
ABSTRACT: Starting with the implicit assumption that the
products of the mass media play an important part in the
everyday consciousness of the people who consume these
products, this paper argues that the animated films and the
theme parks created by the Walt Disney Company establish
what I call a "boundary maintenance mechanism" in its
American consumers. By engaging in a textual analysis of
three of Disney's animated films (_The Three Caballeros_,
_The Jungle Book_, and _Aladdin_), as well as a textual
analysis that draws on ethnographic fieldwork done while I
was employed at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim,
California, I utilize the writings of Fanon on "black
consciousness" to argue that the inscription of American
political and cultural imperial discourses into stories
derived from local colonial situations serves as a way of
thinking as a "white American." That is, Disney's products
provide, through the development of their culture of
consumption and at the level of the political unconscious,
a consciousness of how their consumers *should* perceive
themselves as proper "Americans" according to their place
in the world. The boundary produced by this political
unconscious is coterminous with the expansion of American
cultural, political, and economic power. Continued
consumption, guaranteed by the veritable wealth of local
stories as well as the continual recycling of older
animated films, ensures the stability of this political
unconscious. -SS
Wes Chapman, "Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of
_Gravity's Rainbow_"
ABSTRACT: This essay examines the intersections between
male gender anxiety and anti-essentialism in Thomas
Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_, in an effort to assess the
viability of anti-essentialism as a political strategy for
male anti-masculinists. Within the novel, sexuality is
shown to be conditioned by pornographic discourses so as to
ensure that subjects of the state respond sexually to
scenes of violence and domination and are thus complicit
with the War's "structures favoring death." Because
subjectivities -- including, presumably, the author's and
reader's -- are constructed by this intersection of
masculinism and militarism, Pynchon's critique of them
operates from within the very ideologies that it critiques.
Pynchon's method is not to disengage from the complex of
masculinism and militarism, but rather to write it out in
extra large letters, so that its operation is made visible
and its energies may be used against it. While Pynchon's
strategy makes masculinism visible, however, it also
reinscribes the very masculinism it critiques and decenters
women's perspectives. The essay concludes by arguing that
while anti-essentialism has been a necessary strategy for a
male profeminist politics, it is not a sufficient strategy.
Strategies and discourses are needed which take account of
men's positions within social discourses and go beyond
gesturing towards male complicity with oppressive
structures to work towards new subjectivities which
reconcile male self-fulfillment with recognition of women
as subjects. -WC
Charles Shepherdson, "The Intimate Alterity of the Real"
ABSTRACT: This article addresses the relation between the
symbolic and the real in Lacan, and was written in response
to readers's comments on an earlier piece published in
_Postmodern Culture_. Interpreters often stress Lacan's
emphasis on language and the symbolic order, noting his
dependence on Saussure and Levi-Strauss, but the concept of
the real introduces issues that classical structuralism was
not intended to address -- matters of sexuality and
embodiment that take Freudian theory beyond linguistics.
It is tempting to maintain that the category of the real
introduces an appeal to biology, or to a pre-linguistic
reality that language only partially and inadequately
represents. My principal claim is that the real is not
equivalent to pre-linguistic reality, but is an effect of
the symbolic order that nevertheless remains irreducible to
language. I address this problem in three related ways.
The first concerns the logic of "inside and outside," and
the question of whether the real is within language
(constituted by the symbolic, as many proponents of
discursive construction would claim), or somehow beyond
language. This section also deals with Lacan's topological
references, and draws connections between topology and the
body. Current discussions of the "inside" and "outside"
are heavily indebted to Derrida, and I suggest that his
relation to Lacan calls for more extended analysis.
Second, I discuss the "limits of formalization," arguing
that the category of the real introduces a remainder or
surplus-effect that disrupts the symbolic law, thereby
posing the question of whether -- and in what sense --
Lacan is a "post-structuralist." This section also
considers the "object a," the "cause of desire," and
"jouissance" (as well as making some remarks on
transference), as aspects of the real. The expression
"limits of formalization" suggests that these issues arise
for many other thinkers who are concerned with the logical
impasses of structuralism (notably Foucault and Derrida).
The final section distinguishes two distinct versions of
the real (as a pre-linguistic reality that is always lost
when the imaginary and symbolic re-present it, and as a
surplus-effect of symbolization itself), suggesting why the
second is more accurate. This section also discusses
recent work by Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek. -CS
HYPERTEXT ESSAY Adrian Miles, "Hyperweb"
ABSTRACT: When we write *about* electronic textuality, most
of us remain *ab*stract from and *out*side our subject,
since scholarship is still happily married to fixed
typography. Lately, however, especially with the
appearance of groundbreaking academic projects like Alan
Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" (http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/
humanitas_home.html), one begins to wonder about the
old hearth and home. Adrian Miles' "performative" essay on
the nature of hypertext dallies temptingly with some
possibilities of discourse post-print. A moving matrix of
words and images, it makes inquiry into the message of an
emerging, emergent medium. Like hypertexts featured
previously in _Postmodern Culture_, this one requires
active "navigation" of the text; but because it exploits an
interesting affordance of Hypertext Markup Language -- the
curiously simple "client pull" effect -- the sensation is
less of steering than of swimming against a tide. You'll
reach the shore eventually -- but where? This you will
find out; but first some technical advice:
Your Web browser must be capable of interpreting the HTML
tag. Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 and
versions of Netscape Navigator later than 1.1 can do this.
(You should still be able to read the text with other
software, but the dynamics will be lost.)
You can interrupt the automatic transitions in the text at
any point by moving to some page outside of "Hyperweb."
If you're reading this in Australia or New Zealand, you're
invited to visit "Hyperweb" at its original location
(http://www.ss.rmit.edu.au/miles/hyperweb/).
THANKS TO JOHN DAN JOHNSON-EILOLA OF PURDUE UNIVERSITY FOR
HIS TIMELY HELP WITH THIS PROJECT.
-- Stuart Moulthrop
_________________________________________________________________
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) 1996 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
fee is charged to the user; any exception to this restriction
requires the written consent of the editors and of the publisher.
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