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 1 (September, 1991) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran, Issue Editor
John Unsworth
Book Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: Nancy Cooke
Editorial Board:
Kathy Acker Patrick O'Donnell
Sharon Bassett Elaine Orr
Michael Berube John Paine
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
Susan Howe Susan M. Schultz
E. Ann Kaplan William Spanos
Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart
Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum
Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer
Larysa Mykyta Paul Trembath
Chimalum Nwankwo Greg Ulmer
Phil Novak
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CONTENTS
AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT
Masthead, Contents, Abstracts, CONTENTS 991
Instructions for retrieving files
Daniel R. White, "Literary Ecology and WHITE-1 991
Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's _Mile Zero_ WHITE-2 991
and Thomas Pynchon's _Vineland_"
Bob Perelman, "The Marginalization of Poetry" PERELMAN 991
(a poem)
Michael Joyce, "Notes Toward an Unwritten Non- JOYCE 991
Linear Electronic Text, 'The Ends of Print
Culture'" (a work in progress)
Rei Terada, "Derek Walcott and the Poetics of TERADA 991
'Transport'"
Bernard Duyfhuizen, "'A Suspension Forever at DUYFHU-1 991
the Hinge of Doubt': The Reader-Trap of DUYFHU-2 991
Bianca in _Gravity's Rainbow_"
Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack, J.J. Rome, Joanne MCGANN-1 991
McGrem, Jerome McGann, "A Dialogue on MCGANN-2 991
Dialogue"
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Charles Bernstein, "Play It Again, Pac-Man" POP-CULT 991
REVIEWS:
Bill Hsu, review of SPEW, the first queer punk REVIEW-1 991
fanzine convention. May 25 1991. Randolph
Street Gallery, Chicago.
Gerry O'Sullivan, review of _Heidegger's REVIEW-2 991
Confrontation with Modernity: Technology,
Politics, Art_, by Michael Zimmerman.
Dan Miller, review of _Musical Elaborations_, by REVIEW-3 991
Edward W. Said.
Charles Stivale, review of _Engendering Men: REVIEW-4 991
The Question of Male Feminist Criticism_, by
Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, eds., and
of _Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed)
Criticism_, by Laura Claridge and Elizabeth
Langland, eds.
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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ABSTRACTS
Daniel R. White, "Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas
Sanchez's _Mile Zero_ and Thomas Pynchon's _Vineland_"
ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the postmodern
challenge to the premises of modernism has recently been
augmented by a new literary genre: literary ecology.
Literary ecology challenges the Cartesian technological
paradigm, stemming from the Renaissance, which sees the
human subject or %cogito% as the sole possessor of mind in
nature, and the domination of nature as the human project.
In place of the Cartesian model literary ecologists evoke a
%paranoetic% or _schizophrenic_ mind in which the
consciousness of man fragments and merges with the _mental
ecology_ which is arguably immanent in the biosphere; they
propose adaptation to natural diversity rather than its
reduction to human purposes. Thus there is a convergence
between certain postmodern concepts such a "rhizomic" or
"schizophrenic" or "doubly coded" discourse, on the one
hand, and the "ecologic" of the ecological mind, on the
other. Literary ecology makes this convergence evident by
innovative textual strategies and constitutes a new form of
discourse in which %poesis% becomes a creative extension of
morphogenesis and counsel of ecological wisdom. Just as
importantly, literary ecology interweaves deep ecological
concerns with those of socialist ecology and ecological
feminism. --DRW
Michael Joyce, "Toward An Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text,
'The Ends of Print Culture'"
ABSTRACT: In what Jay Bolter calls "the late age of
print," the topography of the text is subverted and reading
is design-enacted. The choices a text presents depend upon
the complicity of the reader in creating and shaping meaning
and narrative. As more people buy and do not read more
books than have ever been published before, often with
higher advances than ever before, the book is merely a
fleeting, momentarily marketable, physical instantiation of
the network. Readers face the task of re-embodying reading
as movement, as an action rather than a thing--network out
of book. Hyperfiction writers confront the topographic
(sensual) organization of the text and ask how it might
present readers with reciprocal choices that constitute and
transform the current state of the text. Multiple fiction
(hyperfiction) is the first instance of the true electronic
text, what we will come to conceive as the natural form of
multimodal, multi-sensual writing; it is not the
transitional electronic analogue of a printed text.
Multiple fictions can neither be conceived nor experienced
in any other way. They are imagined and composed within
their own idiom and electronic environment, not cobbled
together from pre-ordained texts like a hypertextual
encyclopedia on a CD. Multiple fictions are instances of
what Jane Yellowlees Douglas terms "the genuine post-modern
text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the
great 'either/or' and embracing, instead, the
'and/and/and'." The issues at hand are not technological
but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and
why. --MJ
Rei Terada, "Derek Walcott and the Poetics of 'Transport'"
ABSTRACT: Critical consideration of Derek Walcott's
poetry has focused upon the problematic relation of his
formal traditionalism to his postcolonial themes. Although
Walcott's postmodernity has not been discussed, the
difficult relation of rhetoric to principle in Walcott's
work points up limitations in definitions of postmodernism
which themselves conflate rhetoric with principle, form with
content. Walcott feels no need to emphasize or estrange
rhetoric as some other postmodern poets do, but only because
rhetorical estrangement can be taken for granted in all
language. Walcott's late lyric "The Light of the World"
explores both the consequences and the boundaries of poetic
"transport" (in the senses both of lyric rapture and of
metaphor). In this poem Walcott seeks the relation of
poetic figuration to ordinary speech, and finds that the
former persistently inhabits the latter. We should see
Walcott's poetic style not as rhetorical conventionality,
but as an outgrowth of this quite characteristically
postmodern discovery. --RT
Bernard Duyfhuizen, "A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt:
The Reader-Trap of Bianca in _Gravity's Rainbow_"
ABSTRACT: Readers of Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's
Rainbow_ often find themselves either lost in a textual maze
or making seemingly authoritative decisions about the text's
representations. Closer scrutiny of these representations,
however, reveals these decisions to be the product of
Pynchon's postmodern narrative technique that traps the
reader into questionable teleological judgments. A case in
point is the character of Bianca, one of the shadow children
of the Zone and one of Slothrop's sexual partners.
Conventional readings of Bianca (and necessarily of
Slothrop's relationship with her) base themselves on a
misperception of her age and on a need to specify her death
within the textual universe. In showing how these readings
are both produced and misguided, this essay uncovers a more
significant layer of reading problematics, focusing on the
production of textual representation and on the function of
gender and reading in _Gravity's Rainbow_. Through this
reading of the semiotic matrix encoding "Bianca," the essay
attempts to show how a poststructuralist strategy of
reading, one that remains open to textual uncertainty and
the play of textual %differance%, must be engaged to avoid a
premature foreclosure of narrativity and to allow the text's
other levels of representation to emerge. --BD
Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack, J.J. Rome, Joanne McGrem, and Jerome
McGann, "A Dialogue on Dialogue"
ABSTRACT: In a sense this text has no message that
could be separated out from its medium. The text is an
illustration of itself, of the operation of dialogue as a
form of masquerade. As such, it may also be read as a kind
of parody of itself--how serious a parody would be a matter
of dispute. The dialogue features four, five, or eight
"notional" characters (the number depends on how one
counts), as well as one (apparently) "real" character.
There are (is?) as well "Footnotes," which appear to
function as yet another (in this case unnamed) "voice."
"Footnotes" distinguishes the following critical positions
on the dialogue form: interpretation is dialogue (Mannejc);
critique is dialogic (Rome); poetry is dialogic (Mack);
dialogue is poetry (McGrem). Other views (Footnotes',
McGann's, ABC's) might be defined as well. The entire
exercise seems intended as an interrogation (or display, or
send-up) of dialogical imagination, a critical idea (or
ideology) that has exercised great authority in contemporary
critical practice. --JJM
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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) 1991 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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