CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Loren Glass, "Publicizing the President's Privates"

Anthony Burke, "Violence and Reason on the Shoals of 
Vietnam"

Heather Hicks, "Automating Feminism: The Case of Joanna 
Russ's _The Female Man_"

Jed Rasula, "Textual Indigence in the Archive"

James McCorkle, "Prophecy and the Figure of the Reader 
in Susan Howe's _Articulation of Sound Forms in Time_"

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                           Reviews

Brian Morris, "If You Build It, They Will Come."  A 
review of John Hannigan, _Fantasy City: Pleasure and 
Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis_.  London: Routledge, 
1998.

Graham J. Murphy, "Pernicious Couplings and Living in 
the Splice."  A review of N. Katherine Hayles, _How We 
Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, 
Literature and Informatics_.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 
1999.

Mahmut Mutman, "Writing the Body: Problematizing 
Cultural Studies, Postmodernism and Feminism's 
Relevance."  A review of Vicki Kirby, _Telling Flesh: 
The Substance of the Corporeal_.  New York & London: 
Routledge, 1997.

Stephen Nardi, "Watching Los Angeles Burn."  A review of 
Mike Davis, _Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the 
Imagination of Disaster_.  New York: Metropolitan Books - 
Henry Holt & Company, 1998.

Julian Levinson, "Derac(e)inated Jews."  A review of 
Karen Brodkin, _How Jews Became White Folks & What That 
Says About Race in America_.  New Brunswick: Rutgers 
UP, 1998.

Richard Quinn, "Poetry at the Millennium: 'Open on its 
Forward Side.'" A review of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre 
Joris, eds., _Poems for the Millennium: The University 
of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry 
(Volume Two: From Postwar to Millenium)_.  Berkeley: U 
of California P, 1998.

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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

Anthony Burke, "Violence and Reason on the Shoals of 
Vietnam"

    o Abstract: Through a critical reading of some of the 
      most influential historiography of the Vietnam war, 
      including Coppola's film _Apocalyse Now_ and Robert 
      McNamara's memoir _In Retrospect, this essay 
      analyses the way in which "Vietnam" constitutes one 
      of the late twentieth century's most revealing 
      cultural tableaux: both a political, strategic, and 
      mythological crisis for the United States, and a 
      stage for some of the most profound ontological 
      anxieties of western modernity.  In particular, the 
      essay takes up the theme of politics and violence 
      through the way reason--as a complex formation of 
      geopolitical power, a seductive locus of identity, 
      and a movement of historical progress--has been 
      problematised within these texts.  I argue that 
      these texts attempt to reconcile two antithetical 
      impulses: the first opens up a vast aporia within 
      modernity's claims to reason and culmination, an 
      event Lyotard characterised as an "abyss" within 
      enlightenment thought, and to which Habermas's 
      work is also addressed; the second, more sinister, 
      seeks recuperation.  Here no such aporia is 
      acknowledged, and reason becomes an apologia for 
      the violence of the war and the discursive 
      architecture which drove its execution.  The 
      violence of the Cartesian paradigm is retained, 
      and reason's function as a promise of historical 
      perfection is revived through a vast act of 
      forgetting in the writing of Francis Fukuyama.  
      The essay concludes that the invention of formal 
      models of non-coercive reason are of less use 
      than a relentless suspicion of the concrete 
      historical effects of such metaphysical claims 
      to liberation.--ab


Loren Glass, "Publicizing the President's Privates"

    o Abstract: In this paper I argue that the obsessive 
      attention to Bill Clinton's penis in the recent 
      White House sex scandal indicates a crisis in the 
      patriarchal structure of public authority that 
      depends upon concealing the anatomical penis behind 
      the symbolic phallus.  I trace the coordinates of 
      this crisis, and its attendant risks and 
      opportunities, across three public spaces of 
      discourse and debate.  First, I analyze the Starr 
      Report itself as mobilizing the contradictory 
      appeals of what I am calling the pornographic public 
      sphere, in which explicit discussion and 
      representation of sexuality has come to articulate 
      political allegiances and antagonisms.  Second, I 
      look at Internet discussions of the crisis that 
      indicate the close relationship between new 
      technologies of communication and new protocols of 
      public discourse.  Finally, I conclude with a 
      consideration of Bill and Hillary's opaque 
      "professional" marriage as indicating an ambiguous 
      model of domesticity that seems to be displacing 
      more conventional patriarchal models of the family.  
      My argument throughout is that the Clinton sex 
      scandals have shown that the ideology of patriarchy 
      is becoming increasingly unable to regulate the 
      boundary between private life and public 
      representation in the United States.--lg

Heather J. Hicks, "Automating Feminism: The Case of 
Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_"
 
    o Abstract: By the end of the 1960s, visions of a 
      "post-scarcity" economy in which automated 
      technologies would supplant human workers became 
      increasingly central to platforms of New Left 
      organizations such as the Students for a Democratic 
      Society.  Yet it was during the very years in which 
      this interest in cybernation became widespread in 
      leftist circles that the American liberal feminist 
      movement gained real momentum by advancing women's 
      right to work.  Joanna Russ's landmark feminist 
      novel, _The Female Man (1975), can be read as a 
      social artifact of this conflicted  moment in the 
      history of American women and technology.  Her novel 
      depicts the ways in which automated technology, with 
      its promise of abundance and leisure, dramatically 
      complicated the meanings of the term "work" at the 
      very moment in which women were attempting to lay 
      claim to it.  

      Understanding Russ's novel as an exploration of the 
      social meanings of women's work requires that we 
      regard it not only as a "postmodern" novel, but as a
      postindustrial one.  In these terms, by illuminating 
      the dilemma automation posed to women's efforts to 
      associate themselves with the traditionally 
      empowering concept of work, _The Female Man_ 
      historicizes and complicates Donna Haraway's 
      celebration of the "cyborg" as a progressive icon 
      for contemporary female workers.--hjh

James McCorkle, "Prophecy and the Figure of the Reader 
in Susan Howe's _Articulation of Sound Forms in Time_"

    o Abstract: Susan Howe's _Articulation of Sound Forms 
      in Time_ is considered in light of Heidegger's 
      condition of an "openness to mystery" or as Gerald 
      Burns explains, "the region of the question" and its 
      uncontainability within finite interpretations." The 
      importance of Howe's work lies in its testing of the 
      conditions of mastery and control--issues that are 
      among those Howe explores and incorporates from her 
      readings of Emily Dickinson.  Interpretations, such 
      as those of Perloff and Reinfeld, begin with the 
      re-assembling of a narrative from the fragments that 
      Howe offers.  Such a critical direction suggests the 
      act of interpretation must be, or can only be, a 
      normative, disciplining method.  Such a process must 
      be resisted: the retrieval of histories, texts, and 
      identities does not imply a necessary containment or 
      totalizing of memory.  Memory, instead, allows for 
      imaginative inquiry, which is redoubled in Howe's 
      poem, with the possibility of prophecy: the Falls 
      Fight of 1676 that Howe uses as her foundational 
      source becomes a mirror for ourselves.  Hope 
      Atherton prefigures the conditions and failures of 
      community, as well as a genealogy of policing.  As 
      prophecy, Howe's poem invites us to participate in 
      the signifying process; each word of the poem 
      becomes a site for meditation and a reflection on 
      the history of what was and what is still becoming.
      --jm


Jed Rasula, "Textual Indigence in the Archive"

    o Abstract: Currently the Internet animates dreams of 
      instantaneous telepresence and rapid data transfer, 
      but the "dromocratic" revolution also makes rapid 
      conceptual transit compulsory (Virilio).  The modern 
      enthrallment with speed is a nascent stipulation of 
      communication  technologies that are modeled on, and 
      answerable to, the cross-referencing mobility 
      pioneered in the Enlightenment encyclopedia.  The 
      efficiency of the archival web of encyclopedism 
      readily leads to a complacent mirage of power and 
      control.  In order to examine this mirage, I discuss 
      two "encyclopedic" novels--_Moby-Dick_ and _The Magic 
      Mountain_--which disclose, below the utopian fantasy 
      of unambiguous signals and noise-free channels, a 
      salutary posture of indigence.  The peril attendant 
      on digitized telepresence is that the uniform coding 
      of data obliterates tactile agency.  But a phantom 
      materiality lingers on, traceable by way of the 
      cross-referencing and multiple-coding options of the 
      Encyclopedia.  The challenge of a plenitude of 
      cross-referencing is one of surfeit: the enhancement 
      of cognitive speed, confronting the increased 
      magnitude of material to which its rapid conceptual 
      transit makes access, reinstates idealism as a 
      vindictive triumph over matter.  The novels I 
      examine by Melville and Mann confront mountains of 
      data, but resist the enticements to mobility of 
      encyclopedic culture, casting their lots instead 
      with an indigent reserve, rehearsing narrative 
      tactics of delay, meander, filibuster.  Maximizing 
      the tension between documentation and storytelling, 
      they demonstrate the epistemological lesson that a 
      surface rationalism conceals an atavistic endowment 
      that is at once a "pre-rational" or mythic threat 
      as well as a repository of creative energy--the very 
      energy required in order to compose the work: 
      nothing less than a microbial sentience that makes 
      us what we are without our ever having to know 
      anything about it, the charmed circle of life 
      itself in which the pleasures of circulating exceed 
      the compass of human knowledge.--jr