CONTENTS

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                        Articles

Ian Baucom, "Charting the 'Black Atlantic'"

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, "Notes on Mutopia"

Alec McHoul, "Cyberbeing and ~space"

Sergio Sismondo, "Reality for Cybernauts"

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                         Response

Greg Ulmer, "A Response to _Twelve Blue_ by Michael Joyce"

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                          Poetry

Cory Brown, "First Communion," "There was a Time," "Summer 
Questions," and "Stars of Desire"

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                         Reviews

David Herman, "Structuralism's Fortunate Fall."  Review 
of Francois Dosse, _History of Structuralism_, Vols. I 
(_The Rising Sign, 1945-1966_) and II (_The Sign Sets, 
1967-Present_). Trans. Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: U 
of Minnesota P, 1997. 

Stacy Takacs, "Renegotiating Culture and Society in a 
Global Context."  Review of Anthony King, ed., _Culture, 
Globalization and the World System: Contemporary 
Conditions for the Representation of Identity_.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 

Matthew Roberson, "Tuned In."  Review of Larry McCaffery, 
_Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative 
American Authors_.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 
1996. 

Charles D. Martin, "From Freaks to Goddesses."  Review 
of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, _Extraordinary Bodies: 
Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and 
Literature_. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 

Stefan Mattessich, "Telluric Texts, Implicate Spaces." 
Review of Thomas Pynchon, _Mason & Dixon_. New York: 
Henry Holt & Company, 1997. 

Rena Potok, "CrossConnections: Literary Culture in 
Cyberspace."  Review of on-line literary and university 
reviews/magazines. 

David Caplan, "Who's Zoomin Who?: The Poetics of 
www.poets.org and wings.buffalo.edu/epc."  Review of The 
Academy of American Poets' Website and the Electronic 
Poetry Center.


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                         Letters

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                         Notices
                    [WWW Version only]
     
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Ian Baucom, "Charting the 'Black Atlantic'"

     Abstract: In recent critical and theoretical discourse 
     space has become a dominant metaphor for describing 
     cultural production, cultural processes, and cultural 
     forms.  We now refer to the location of culture, to 
     cognitive mapping, to intercultural zones, border 
     literatures, discursive sites, and linguistic grids.  
     This essay explores the meaning of that increasingly 
     omnipresent (and thus increasingly invisible) metaphor,
     assessing both the intellectual leverage and the 
     conceptual limitations attendant on spatial models of 
     culture.  More specifically, it challenges models of 
     cultural production predicated on the idea of national 
     space by addressing the oceanic territorialities of 
     that cultural region Paul Gilroy has labeled the "Black 
     Atlantic."  The essay traces the rich metaphoric 
     possibilities of this oceanic space as an alternative 
     model for postcolonial cultural production.  Moving 
     from Conrad and Ruskin to Glissant and Fanon, the paper 
     proposes a new vocabulary of liquid flows and currents 
     to describe what has, thus far, been described in the
     botanic vocabulary of hybrids and rhizomes.  This 
     hydrographic language forces a new understanding of 
     the dispersed, yet linked, geographies of 
     postcolonialism.  Moving beyond vague models of 
     cultural hybridity, it insists on free-floating 
     networks of undersea roots that reflect specific 
     diasporic routes of colonial and postcolonial history.  
     This refiguration--exemplified in focused readings of 
     contemprary "Black British" art--brings us below the 
     surface of official national identities (e.g., Ruskin's 
     Englishness) creating synaptic networks of meaningful 
     relation between past and present without observing the 
     frozen territorial boundaries of imperial history.--ib 


Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, "Notes on Mutopia"

     Abstract: In the postmodern era, rapid movements of 
     peoples and cultural chunks erode the boundaries 
     between places and paths.  The institutions associated 
     with Utopia and Anti-Utopia dissolve: nation, work, the 
     city, Reason, the real and the ideal.  Even when people 
     do not move, the world migrates under and around them.  
     The history of models of a rational, free home where 
     human beings can finally rest speeds up into the model 
     of perpetual movement: mutopia.  Mutopia is mutant, 
     mutable, mute, and founded on "mu," the unasking of 
     questions.  Mutopia is ecstatic and unconscious, the   
     instantaneous negation of rational boundaries.  Its 
     institutions are the cyborg, the Net, science fiction, 
     disappearance.  "Notes on Mutopia" examines 
     freeze-frames of the evolution of Mutopia.--icr 


Alec McHoul, "Cyberbeing and ~space"

     Abstract: Beginning with Heidegger's insight that in 
     understanding, we always understand as, this paper goes 
     on to explore his categorisation of being and to reflect 
     on the particular tensions of it that operate in cyber 
     domains.  Its main argument is that the cyber is not 
     strictly identical with the virtual.  Rather if the 
     actual/virtual distinction is a distinction between 
     "as" and "as if," then cyber beings are those that 
     flicker or hover (often extremely quickly) between
     these two positions.--am 


Sergio Sismondo, "Reality for Cybernauts"

     Abstract: Michael Heim says: "With its virtual 
     environments and simulated worlds, cyberspace is a 
     metaphysical laboratory, a tool for examining our very 
     sense of reality."  He may be right in pointing to
     cyberspace as a metaphysical laboratory, but the 
     laboratory he is talking about is largely unbuilt.  
     Currently-available virtual reality (VR), for example, 
     is more crude as a metaphysical laboratory than are our
     imaginations, literature, and thought experiments.  But 
     the limitations of existing VR are less important if 
     the intention is to use discussions of VR to examine 
     our sense of reality. In this paper I look at our use 
     of the term "reality," particularly in the context of 
     VR, and the presuppositions of that use.  Although 
     there is no one consistent picture of reality implicit 
     in talk about VR, there are at least some common 
     images.  Some of those images are exactly what are 
     needed to revamp talk of reality, and some are 
     misguided.  In order to show why we should prefer some 
     images I offer a general account of reality-talk and 
     argue that that amounts to the same thing as a general 
     account of reality.  This account makes space for, but 
     does not guarantee, the reality of VR, and much more 
     besides.--ss