CONTENTS 

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                      Editors' Note

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			 Articles
           
Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Postcolonial Bazaar: Thoughts 
on Teaching the Market in Postcolonial Objects"

Alec McHoul, "Cybernetymology and ~ethics"

Benjamin Friedlander, "Poetics, Polemic, and the Question 
of Intelligibility"

Kevin McGuirk, "A.R. Ammons and 'the only terrible health' 
of Poetics"

Evgeny Pavlov, "What We Talk About When We Talk About 
Poetry: A Recent View from St. Petersburg"--A Translation of 
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's "On the Superfluous"


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                         Reviews

Rita Barnard, "Another Country: Amnesia and Memory in 
Contemporary South Africa."  A review of Jeremy Cronin, _Even 
the Dead: Poems, Parables, and a Jeremiad_.  Cape Town: David 
Philip, 1997; and Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds., 
_Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa_. 
Oxford UP, 1998.

Robert Elliot Fox, "Shaping an African American Literary 
Canon."  A review of _The Norton Anthology of African 
American Literature_, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. 
McKay, general editors.  New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.  
Includes an audio companion compact disc with 21 selections; 
and _Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the 
African American Literary Tradition_.  Patricia Liggins Hill, 
general editor.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.  Includes 
an audio companion compact disc with 26 selections. 

James S. Hurley, "Real Virtuality: Slavoj Zizek and 
'Post-Ideological' Ideology."  A review of Slavoj Zizek, _The 
Plague of Fantasies_.  London: Verso, 1997.

Todd M. Kuchta, "The Dyer Straits of Whiteness."  A review of 
Richard Dyer, _White._  London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Theresa Smalec, "The Therapeutic Stage/Page: Facts and 
Fictions about the Dead to Stir the Living."  A review of 
Peggy Phelan, _Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories_.  
London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

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                         Traffic

Kelly Cresap, "Ride the Classics 'Coast to 'Coast" 
[WWW Version only]

Joel Weishaus, "IMAGING EmerAgency: A Conversation With 
Gregory Ulmer"

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                         Letters

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                         Notices
                    [WWW Version only]

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                  Notes on Contributors   
                       
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                        Abstracts

Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Postcolonial Bazaar: Thoughts on 
Teaching the Market in Postcolonial Objects"

   o Abstract: Much of the contemporary soul-searching by 
     postcolonial intellectuals living and teaching in first 
     world locations has circulated around the question: 
     does the institutionalization of the postcolonial 
     evacuate it as a gesture/movement of resistance to 
     continuing western imperialism?  Taking the single 
     act of choosing literary texts, I chart the itinerary 
     of the postcolonial as it travels through critical 
     discourses, popular cultures and the media, public 
     spheres, and academic policies and pedagogies.  Framing 
     my inquiry in current debates on the postcolonial and 
     the postmodern, I tackle questions such as: what is the 
     purchase of the "postcolonial" in the American academy? 
     How is literary value assigned to texts in terms of the 
     transnational publishing/distribution networks, 
     epistemological and educational histories in 
     postcolonial contexts, and the doling out of symbolic 
     sanctions?  What kinds of political responsibilities 
     do postcolonial intellectuals have and to whom?  In the 
     postmodern era of global cultural economies, 
     intersecting and deterritorialized public spheres, and 
     the saturation of those spheres with electronic 
     reproductions/mass media harnessed to dominant
     (financial, military, institutional) interests, surely 
     the politics of culture must be reconceptualized in 
     transnational terms. 

     My analysis offers a two-pronged approach to negotiate 
     the problems cited here: first, the need to "teach the 
     market" along with the text and, second, the practice of 
     an international cultural studies.  Teaching the 
     politics of the academy, pedagogy and the publishing 
     industry, the relationship of academia to international 
     public spheres, and the intersections of all kinds of 
     cultural work with critical theory, along with our 
     choice of postcolonial texts offers ways to recuperate 
     the postcolonial as cultural/political resistance.  
     While as critics we take on an immense task of cultural 
     imagination that charts, analyzes, critiques and 
     catalogs, as teachers we must hunker down to a set of 
     strategies that combat institutional and market 
     constraints.--bg


Alec McHoul, "Cybernetymology and ~ethics"

   o Abstract: By working from the etymology of the word 
     "cybernetics" and its variants, this paper opens up the 
     question of the ethics of the cyber as its "ethos" in a 
     quite specific sense.  That ethos has to do with the 
     ways in which all things cyber are far from being the 
     antithesis of the "human."  On the contrary, in Wiener's 
     original sense, which refers to "the entire field of 
     control and communication theory, whether in the machine 
     or in the animal," the cybernetic includes the human.  
     However, this does not mean a complete identity between 
     humans and those few machines that are also and 
     incidentally cybernetic.  The human capacity for 
     reflexive accounting marks a critical difference.--am


Benjamin Friedlander, "Poetics, Polemic, and the Question of 
Intelligibility"

   o Abstract: In this paper, I address the uneasy balance 
     between critical and poetic language and the potential 
     contradiction between these two modes of expression that 
     poets entertain when they set about writing their 
     "statements of poetics."  More specifically, through a 
     close reading of Ron Silliman's brief essay "Wild Form," 
     I show how such statements enact this uneasy balance and 
     resolve this potential contradiction most decisively in 
     their underlying formal patterns.  In the case of "Wild 
     Form," this underlying pattern takes the 
     quasi-dialectical shape of two see-saws balanced on a 
     third see-saw, a pattern which bears a strong 
     resemblance to the quasi-dialectical progression of 
     Silliman's long poem _Tjanting_.  It is this formal 
     resemblance, I argue, more than the polemical content of 
     "Wild Form's" various statements, which vouches for the 
     continuity and seriousness of Silliman's work.  Indeed, 
     given the willingness and even eagerness with which 
     Silliman embraces the risk of confusion, it is only by 
     attending to such structural repetitions that the deeper 
     aspirations of his critical and poetic projects can 
     become intelligible.--bf


Kevin McGuirk, "A.R. Ammons and 'the only terrible health' of 
Poetics"

   o Abstract: Since the early 1980s, critics have typically 
     defined the postmodern in poetry by opposing the 
     postmodern text (usually the long poem) to the 
     postromantic lyric.  It's interesting, then, that while 
     his critics divide into a group of lyric critics (Bloom, 
     Vendler, et al.) and a few %isolatos% working out the 
     operational procedures of his longer poems, A.R. Ammons 
     has worked in both modes since the early '60s.  This 
     essay examines a different opposition within Ammons's 
     writing: on the one hand, the "swarming profusion" 
     (Ashbery) of brief lyrics and longer poems together; on 
     the other, a handful of much-anthologized *works*, poems 
     that in cadence and statement propose to transcend the 
     open totality of his poetry by knowing it better than it 
     knows itself.  In his verse "Essay on Poetics" (1970), 
     Ammons declares that "abandonment / is the only terrible 
     health."  The lyrics, accordingly, are mere trials and 
     re-trials which repeatedly abandon the romantic drift 
     toward epiphany, while the long poems aggregate but 
     refuse to comprehend.  Taking the late elegy "Easter 
     Morning" as my example of a *work*, I argue that Ammons 
     elaborates not simply two literary modes, but two 
     discursive healths or "fatalities": the fatality of 
     death (with its correspondent elegiac *work*); and "the 
     only terrible health" of abandonment which is, in 
     Baudrillard's sense, a continuing fatality because it is 
     banal.  In the first, the object is the subject's 
     mirror; in the second, the object is not the subject's 
     mirror, and so the poem must again and again abandon 
     both the object and the poem of the object.  In 
     returning to the scene of childhood loss, "Easter 
     Morning" proposes to close a circle and resolve the 
     problem of the whole poetry, but can do so only by being 
     incommensurable with it.--km


Evgeny Pavlov, "What We Talk About When We Talk About 
Poetry: A Recent View from St. Petersburg"--A 
Translation of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's "On the 
Superfluous"

   o Abstract: Today poetry is something unnecessary, 
     *superfluous*.  Confined within the conventional bounds 
     of *writing*, it has been barred from naively 
     questioning its own nature and the limits of its scene.  
     Yet poetry does not err in any projection of its 
     questioning itself because it is the unconscious of a 
     society, the four-dimensional landscape of an impeccable 
     action.  It is the fullest *absence*--above all, of 
     representation.  Meanwhile, the desire for 
     absence--stasis, Logos, Fullness, death--is accompanied 
     by the insurmountable fear of transgressing the line 
     that separates from it.  The poetic non-journey of 
     non-transgressive transgression is always a return to 
     its own beginning.  It is the experience of 
     insufficiency.  Every word, even if preceded or 
     followed by another, speaks of "not connectibility," 
     "not compatibility," of rupture.  "On the Superfluous" 
     is a paratactic rumination on poetry and parataxis.  It 
     examines the residual surplus of insufficiency that 
     poetry accumulates in the idle melancholy of its endless 
     beginnings.--ep