CONTENTS 

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                         Articles

Paul Youngquist, "Ballard's Crash-Body"

Daniel Punday, "Derrida in the World: Space and
Post-Deconstructive Textual Analysis"

Nicola Pitchford, "Flogging a Dead Language: Identity Politics,
Sex, and the Freak Reader in Acker's _Don Quixote_"

Mark Hansen, "Becoming as Creative Involution?: Contextualizing
Deleuze and Guattari's Biophilosophy"

Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip, "Of Bugs and Rats:
Cyber-Cleanliness, Cyber-Squalor, and the Fantasy-Spaces of
Informational Globalization"



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                          Reviews

Richard Kaye, "The Masculine Mystique." A review of Susan Bordo, 
_The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private_. New York: 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 

Jason B. Jones, "The Real Happens." A review of Alenka Zupancic, 
_Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan_. New York: Verso, 2000. 

Andrew Hoberek, "Reconstructing Southern Literature." A review of 
Michael Kreyling, _Inventing Southern Literature_. Jackson: UP of 
Mississippi, 1998, and Patricia Yaeger, _Dirt and Desire: 
Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990_. Chicago: U 
of Chicago P, 2000. 

Michael Sinding, "Metaphor in the Raw." A review of George Lakoff 
and Mark Johnson, _Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
Its Challenge to Western Thought_. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 

David Banash, "Selling Surveillance: Privacy, Anonymity, and VTV." 
A review of _Survivor_ and _Big Brother_. CBS, 2000. 

Sheli Ayers, "Glamorama Vanitas: Bret Easton Ellis's Postmodern
Allegory." A review of Bret Easton Ellis, _Glamorama_. New York:  
Alfred A.  Knopf, 1999. 

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                          Related Readings
 			 [WWW Version Only]

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                          Bibliography of
                           Postmodernism
                        and Critical Theory
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                              Notices
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                        Notes on Contributors

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                             Abstracts


Paul Youngquist, "Ballard's Crash-Body   

    o Abstract: J. G. Ballard's techno-pornographic novel _Crash_
      examines what has become of the human body in a late 
      industrial landscape.  Unlike Cronenberg's movie version, 
      which yet again pursues the tired material of sexual 
      conquest, Ballard's book depicts a recent cultural 
      transformation not only in what constitutes a body , but 
      also in what comprises its sexuality.  Thanks to a variety 
      of developments that include photoduplication, mass media, 
      celebrity, and above all cars, the body has been 
      transformed from an intimate organic interior into multiple
      exteriorities. Ballard suggests that media representation 
      and mass production turn the body inside out, allowing it 
      to be assimilated to surfaces potentially coextensive with 
      culture.  Under these circumstances the automobile crash 
      becomes the secular, public equivalent of orgasm and
      apocalypse, the sudden fracture of a bodily system that 
      reveals its aspirations and operations. In this regard a 
      crash is the contemporary cultural equivalent of 
      crucifixion, a point illustrated by a comparison between 
      Matthias Grunewald's Isenheimer Altarpiece and several 
      incidents in Ballard's novel.  Ballard dramatizes what we 
      only dimly perceive: that sexuality today circulates 
      through bodies, cars, and celebrities and that apocalypse 
      now occurs with the banal frequency of the traffic 
      fatality.--py

Daniel Punday, "Derrida in the World: Space and
Post-Deconstructive Textual Analysis"

    o Abstract: Critics have frequently claimed that 
      deconstruction ignores its own political "location" within 
      the world because of its emphasis on the seemingly 
      autonomous textual play of diffirance. In response, a 
      number of critics have sought to develop a 
      "post-deconstructive" criticism that takes account of the 
      context in which it functions. This essay argues that the 
      assumption that deconstruction is antithetical to an 
      interest in such location is mistaken, and that in 
      Derrida's writing there is a complex theory of textual 
      sites that stage discursive slippages by reference to the 
      critic's position in the world. The key to understanding 
      this theory is reevaluating the way that Derrida's 
      understanding of textual space has been simplified by 
      critics, who insist on seeing it as a flat and relatively 
      simple stage upon which textual conflicts are staged. By 
      turning to Derrida 's essay "Ousia and Gramme," we can 
      recognize a dynamic textual space that is produced by
      reference to the "limits" of temporal movement within that 
      space, an understanding that informs all of Derrida's 
      writing about textual play. This dynamic space, this essay 
      argues, is the best model for a post-deconstructive 
      criticism that seeks to take account of critical 
      location.--dp
                                                                          
Nicola Pitchford, "Flogging a Dead Language: Identity Politics,
Sex, and the Freak Reader in Acker's _Don Quixote_"

    o Abstract: This article examines the construction of an 
      implied reader in Kathy Acker's 1986 novel, _Don Quixote_. 
      Acker's female Quixote re-reads an array of patriarchal 
      texts, attempting to find a place for the active female 
      desire that they universally exclude. The problem with 
      Acker's pastiche strategy is that it seems to posit--and 
      thus, merely to reproduce--a fixed opposition between the 
      implied reader of patriarchal traditions and a female, 
      "freak" reader (both within Acker's text and of it) whose 
      agency derives from her position of total exclusion from 
      such traditions. However, historicizing this essentializing 
      strain in Acker's work reveals a more ambivalent 
      combination of two central tendencies in feminism in the 
      mid-1980s: identity politics and poststructuralism.  Both 
      seek to disrupt the hegemonic subject of feminism through 
      their distinct constructions of difference. Acker keeps 
      both in play by invoking, ironically, a third model of 
      difference that arose concurrently from anti-pornography 
      feminism: _Don Quixote_ locates differences in modes of 
      reading, especially in its use of obscene materials--termed 
      "pornographic" by some feminist critics.  The implied 
      reader of Acker's sex scenes exists in a more complex, 
      triangular relation to authorized readers: she must define 
      herself in opposition not only to the mainstream, literary 
      reader--which here includes the censorious feminist 
      reader--but also to the male masturbator whose desires such 
      obscenity traditionally legitimates. In the negotiation 
      among these three reading locations, Acker's novel may 
      offer a contingent and particular version of agency and 
      female pleasure.--np

Mark Hansen, "Becoming as Creative Involution?: Contextualizing
Deleuze and Guattari's Biophilosophy"

    o Abstract: This paper critically examines Deleuze and 
      Guattari's biophilosophy in light of Deleuze's earlier work 
      on Bergson as well as contemporary work in biology. 
      Contrasting D+G's account of "creative involution" with 
      recent work in biological complexity theory, the paper 
      questions two central tenets of the differential, 
      anti-Darwinian theory of "evolutionary" change they develop
      in _A Thousand Plateaus_: 1) their marginalization of the 
      organism as a molar form that negatively limits life; and 
      2) the dubious use to which they put recent advances in
      molecular biology. The paper argues that D+G's effort to 
      model "becoming" on non-selectional mechanisms of 
      "evolution" is based on a category mistake: the application 
      within a developmental context of concepts proper to 
      macroevolutionary timeframes. As an alternate legacy of 
      Bergsonism, complexity theory furnishes the basis for a 
      theory of somatic change that contrasts with D+G's model of 
      becoming: where the latter relies on an abstract 
      philosophical model--a synchronic monist expressionism 
      modeled on Spinoza's ethics--the former foregrounds the 
      embodied dimension of morphogenesis in a manner that 
      combines the flexibility of the becoming model with a 
      recognition of the role of constraint and form in processes
      of evolutionary and developmental change. Precisely such an 
      understanding of somatic life is imperative to cultural 
      theorists seeking to negotiate the incipient "posthuman" 
      moment of the natural/cultural history of late capitalism. 
      In order to resist the seduction of disembodiment, we need 
      to insist on the crucial role of the organism in producing 
      differences central to both evolution and ontogenetic 
      development.--mh

Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip, "Of Bugs and Rats:
Cyber-Cleanliness, Cyber-Squalor, and the Fantasy-Spaces of
Informational Globalization"

    o Abstract: Informational globalization appears to extend the 
      promise of a pluralist technological utopia to both sides 
      of the former colonial divide, leaving in its wake a 
      class-less, race-less, gender-less society beyond the realm 
      of labored production. However, close examination of one
      instance of this fantasy of decorporealized, depoliticized, 
      technological agency--the "cleanroom" of contemporary 
      microprocessor design and manufacture--reveals persistent 
      traces of schemes of embodiment, contamination, and 
      technical mastery familiar to historians of high 
      colonialism.  The "cleanliness versus filth" binary that 
      structured nineteenth-century Europeans' experiences in the 
      tropics is repeated in late twentieth-century descriptions 
      of a cybernetic progress grounded in the imperfect control 
      of residual, non-computable matter. The operational and 
      conceptual risks posed by that residual matter--the stuff 
      that might jam the smooth functioning of the computing 
      machine--are not merely technical obstacles in the advance 
      and diffusion of these technologies. They are, rather, 
      constitutive elements of a technocratic and critical 
      imaginary which refigures political-economic differentials 
      along a renovated axis of civilization and savagery, 
      cleanliness and squalor. Critical investigation of these 
      fantasy-spaces will require, the authors conclude, a 
      reconceptualization of the emerging fields of informational
      subjectivation so as to take account of their irreducible 
      inconsistency: the mutual constitution of their horror and 
      pleasure.--th and kp