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 1 (September, 1995) ISSN: 1053-1920
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Editors: Eyal Amiran
Lisa Brawley
Stuart Moulthrop, issue ed.
John Unsworth
Review Editor: Jim English
Managing Editor: Sarah Wells
Editorial Assistant: Robyn Marder
List Manager: Chris Barrett
Editorial Board:
Sharon Bassett Chimalum Nwankwo
Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell
Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr
Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff
J. Yellowlees Douglas Fred Pfeil
Graham Hammill Mark Poster
Phillip Brian Harper David Porush
David Herman Carl Raschke
bell hooks Avital Ronell
E. Ann Kaplan Susan Schultz
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos
Arthur Kroker Gary Lee Stonum
Neil Larsen Tony Stewart
Tan Lin Chris Straayer
Jerome McGann Rei Terada
Jim Morrison Paul Trembath
Larysa Mykata Greg Ulmer
Phil Novak
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CONTENTS
TITLE FILENAME
Stephanie Barbe Hammer, "'Just like hammer.995
Eddie' or as far as a boy can go:
Vedder, Barthes, and Handke
Dismember Mama"
Stephen Barker, "Nietzsche/Derrida, barker.995
Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions
of the Unnamable"
Daniel White and Gert Hellerich, "Nietzsche white.995
at the Altar: Situating the Devotee"
Peter Consenstein, "Memory and Oulipian consen.995
Constraints"
Jeffrey T. Nealon, "'Junk' and the Other: nealon.995
Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs"
Tony Thwaites, "Facing Pages: On Response, thwaites.995
A Response to Steven Helmling"
Charles Woodman and Scott Davenport, woodman.995
"Plunder Squad"
RELATED READINGS [WWW version only]
POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:
Rhonda Garelick, "Outrageous Dieting: pop-cult.995
The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons"
REVIEWS:
Crystal Bartolovich, "Have Theory; Will review-1.995
Travel: Constructions of "Cultural Geography."
Review of Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds.,
Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Tamise Van Pelt, "Queering Freud in Freiburg." review-2.995
Review of The Twelfth Annual Conference in
Literature and Psychology. June 21-24,
1995, Freiburg, Germany.
Kristine Butler, "Bordering on Fiction: review-3.995
Chantal Akerman's _D'Est_." Review of
Chantal Akerman's _D'Est_, Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, Minnesota. June 18-August 27.
Steve Martinot, "Spectors of Sartre: Nancy's review-4.995
Romance with Ontological Freedom." Review of
Jean-Luc Nancy, _The Experience of Freedom_.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
Rob Wilkie, "Postmodernism as Usual: 'Theory' review-5.995
in the American Academy Today." Review of
Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, _Theory
as Resistance_. New York: Guilford Press,
1994.
Nickola Pazderic, "Hard Bodies." Review of review-6.995
Susan Jeffords _Hard Bodies: Hollywood
Masculinity in the Reagan Era_. New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994,
and Peter Lehman. _Running Scared:
Masculinity and the Representation of the
Male Body_. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
x, 237 pp.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "The Cult of Print." review-7.995
Review of Sven Birkerts, _The Gutenberg
Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic
Age_. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.
LETTERS:
Selected Letters from Readers letters.995
NOTICES:
Announcements and Advertisements [WWW Version only]
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Special thanks to Dan Ancona and Rick Provine
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ABSTRACTS
Stephanie Barbe Hammer, "'Just like Eddie' or as far as a boy
can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama"
ABSTRACT: A feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and
roll culture bandwagon, I grab the wheel and track Greil
Marcus' assumption that rock culture provides a crucial set
of metaphors for thinking about high culture. This essay
argues that Eddie Vedder (lead singer-composer for PEARL
JAM), French theorist Roland Barthes, and German writer
Peter Handke have upped the ante in the contemporary crisis
of masculinity through frantic, frenetic and deeply ironic
autobiographical performances. At the same time they
struggle to complete, kill off, and have done with the
modern -- an act which assumes the shape of loving and
mourning "mother." Unabashed narcissists just like Eddie,
Roland Barthes and Peter Handke go as far as boys can;
owners of the phallus, they enact the vaginal wound in
their go arounds with mother and with the mother tongue;
they court abjection for our wonder, and dream of a freedom
which must always fail. - SH
Stephen Barker, "Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett:
Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable"
ABSTRACT: Is it possible to walk the tightrope between the
condensation of poetic prose and the terseness of academic
discourse? Can one conceive of doing so without committing
oneself to a performance of the sort of language required
of each? This piece launches itself directly into the core
of this dilemma, trying to balance itself somewhere between
the scholarship required to explore the Nietzsche/Derrida
bond and the poetry inherent in the minimal texts of
Beckett and Blanchot. Investigating the nature of the
fragment and the aphorism in the worlds imagined by each of
these artists, the essay stretches itself across the
abyssal marketplace of paramodern meaning. Starting from
the interrogation of subject-positions in all four of these
writers, proceeding through an analysis of the
tendentiousness of fragmentation as a function of aesthetic
construction, the essay demonstrates how in _The Gay
Science_, some of Derrida's essays, Blanchot's _The Step
Not Beyond_ and Beckett's _How It Is_ and _The Unnamable_,
the conjoint theme of self-parody operates to reverse and
undermine the modernist tradition. - SB
Daniel R. White and Gert Hellerich, "Nietzsche at the Altar:
Situating the Devotee"
ABSTRACT: This essay argues that Nietzsche's critique of
Christianity may be connected, via Bataille, Bateson,
Derrida et al., with his critical vision of modernization,
so as to reveal and genealogically situate the metaphysical
bases of Western neoimperialism: including Eurocentrism,
militarism, scientism and patriarchy. In order to
practice a critical, recursive epistemology, the essay is
cast in the form of a philosophical drama set
(anachronistically) at a nine inch nails concert during the
Gulf War. Nietzsche and others appear as characters on
stage, introduced by a Narrator. Their dialogue is
intertextual. Application of Nietzsche's critique to
popular culture in the US, particularly as revealed in
Kellner's _The Persian Gulf TV War_, exposes the idolatry
and imagology of American self-righteousness: a secular
religion of "power over" the Other. As an alternative,
Nietzsche's philosophy of laughter is combined with
Bateson's theory of play and Cixous' %jouissance% to
propose a cultural semiotics of immanent divinity where the
transcendent god returns to the interplay of communicative
practice in an electronic renaissance. Thus the hierarchic
scheme of domination is to be transformed into the mutual
celebration of life through %die frohliche Wissenschaft%:
the Joyous Science. - DW
Peter Consenstein, "Memory and Oulipian Constraint"
ABSTRACT: Founded originally in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and
Francois Le Lionnais, the group Oulipo (Ouvroir de
litterature potentielle -- The Workshop of Potential
Literature) uses structural constraints as its method to
generate texts. Pre-existent structures, the sonnet for
example, are often at the base of the group member's
constraints, and I am advancing the notion that the
oulipian text's conscientiously designed structures help
the reader to remember the story being told. Since
literary history serves as the original stockpile for
contemporary constraints, the oulipian text also helps the
reader to remember past literature. However, the act of
innovation on past structures simultaneously destroys and
recalls, thus creating a tense fault line between the past
and the present. My analysis of Jacques Roubaud's _La
Boucle_, Georges Perec's _La vie mode d'emploi_, and Italo
Calvino's _If on a winter's night a traveler_ concentrates
on the constraints that drive their novels, and discusses
how, according to oulipian credo, the constraints are
integral to the stories being related. Faced with
postmodern theory, I suggest that their creations are more
than early examples of postmodern "%ecriture%" because the
constraints they adhere to expand the limits of their
creativity. The oulipian text, therefore, is invested with
the author's search for self, or a part of his or her soul,
because it relates a test of his or her creative limits.
Finally, I give evidence that their constraints resemble
the mnemotechniques of medieval writing. Having
philologically linked their constraints to the underlying
construct of medieval texts, I attempt to situate oulipian
writing theoretically. Is it truly an example of that
which we call postmodern, or, more obtusely, is it not an
author's soulful attempt to reclaim and profit from the
technical and formal elements of writing? - PC
Jeffrey T. Nealon, "'Junk' and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas
on Drugs"
ABSTRACT: This essay takes up the ethical imperatives of
infinite desire in Levinas and Burroughs. For Levinas, the
desire at play in the encounter with the other person is a
"%sens unique%," an unrecoverable movement outward, a
one-way direction: a "movement of the Same toward the
Other which never returns to the Same." As Burroughs's
Sailor reminds us, however, there may be no better
description of addiction: "Junk is a one-way street. No
U-turn. You can't go back no more." Burroughs's exterior
movements encounter an other that is other to the
Levinasian widow, stranger or orphan -- an other, finally,
that is other to the human and the privileges of the human
that the philosophical discourse of ethics all-too-often
takes for granted. This essay will attempt to track what
happens when Levinas's humanism of the other person comes
face-to-face with junk, with what Burroughs calls "the face
of 'evil' [that] is always the face of total need." - JN
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comprise this issue of Postmodern Culture are held by their
authors. The compilation as a whole is Copyright (c) 1995 by
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