Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v2n01 (September 1991) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n01-contents.txt 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 2, Number 1 (September, 1991) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 NOTICES 991 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------- TO RETRIEVE SINGLE ITEMS LISTED ABOVE, send a mail message to listserv@ncsuvm or listserv@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu containing as its one and only line the command get [fn ft] pmc-list f=mail (replace [fn ft] with the filename and filetype, as listed in the table of contents, for the file you want to receive). There should be no blank lines, spaces, or other text preceding this line. TO RETRIEVE THE WHOLE ISSUE as a package, send a mail message to listserv@ncsuvm or listserv@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu with the command get pmcv2n1 package pmc-list f=mail If you request the issue as a package, please make certain you have sufficient virtual disk space on your mainframe account to receive it (at least half a megabyte). 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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_. -----------------END OF CONTENTS 991 FOR PMC 2.1-----------------