Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v2n03 (May 1992) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v2n03-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 3 (May, 1992) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Eyal Amiran John Unsworth, Issue Editor Book Review Editor: Jim English Managing Editor: Nancy Cooke List Manager: Chris Barrett Editorial Assistant: Mina Javaher Editorial Board: Kathy Acker Chimalum Nwankwo Sharon Bassett Patrick O'Donnell Michael Berube Elaine Orr 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 E. Ann Kaplan Susan M. Schultz Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer Phil Novak ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT Masthead, Contents, Abstracts, CONTENTS 592 Instructions for retrieving files Russell A. Potter, "Edward Schizohands: POTTER 592 The Postmodern Gothic Body" Fred Pfeil, "Revolting Yet Conserved: Family PFEIL 592 %Noir% in _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_" Tessa Dora Addison and Audrey Extavasia, ADD-EXT 592 "Fucking (With Theory) for Money: Toward an Interrogation of Escort Prostitution" Rochelle Owens, "Drum and Whistle" and OWENS 592 "Black Stems," Two Poems from _LUCA: Discourse on Life & Death_ Donald F. Theall, "Beyond the Orality/Literacy THEALL 592 Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace" Walter Kalaidjian, "Mainlining Postmodernism: KALAIDJI 592 Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and the Art of Intervention" Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and MCCARTHY 592 Perversity: Scientism and Sadism" POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN: Cathy Griggers, "Lesbian Bodies in the Age of POP-CULT 592 (Post)Mechanical Reproduction" REVIEWS: Terry Collins, "The Vietnam War, Reascendant REVIEW-1 592 Conservatism, White Victims," review of _The Vietnam War and American Culture_, ed. John Carlos and Rick Berg, and _Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature_, ed. Philip K. Jason. Michael W. Foley, review of _Post-Modernism REVIEW-2 592 and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions_, by Pauline Marie Rosenau. Ursula K. Heise, "Becoming Postmodern?" REVIEW-3 592 review of _Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time_, by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth. Edward M. Jennings, "The Text is Dead; Long REVIEW-4 592 Live The Techst," review of _Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology_, by George P. Landow. Matthew Mancini, review of _Thinking Across REVIEW-5 592 the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism_, by Giles Gunn. Meryl Altman and Keith Nightenhelser, review of REVIEW-6 592 _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_, by Thomas Laqueur. Mark Poster, review of _Michel Foucault_, by REVIEW-7 592 Didier Eribon. Linda Ray Pratt, "Speaking in Tongues: Dead REVIEW-8 592 Elvis and the Greil Quest," review of _Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession_, by Greil Marcus. Rei Terada, "The Pressures of Merely REVIEW-9 592 Sublimating," review of _American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre_, by Rob Wilson. Announcements and Advertizements NOTICES 592 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Russell A. Potter, "Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body" ABSTRACT: In the conjunction between the gothic body of Edward in Tim Burton's film _Edward Scissorhands_ and the anti-Oedipal Body without Organs in Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_, this essay posits a common machine, that of the fragmentary, persecuting Gothic body. Whether in James Whale's 1931 film _Frankenstein_ or in 1991's _Body Parts_, the partial body appears again and again as the persecuting agent of a society founded upon the monolithically Oedipal nuclear family. This constitution of this body, with its scars and sutures, is in fact fundamentally Anti-Oedipal; when organs do not stay in place, where is an erogenous zone to go? This essay thus offers a reading not only of _Edward Scissorhands_ and its filmic and novelistic precursors, but also of the postmodern suburbanity which beings from Frankenstein to Edward continue to invade. --RAP Fred Pfeil, "Revolting Yet Conserved: Family %Noir% in _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_" ABSTRACT: In the new Hollywood, quintessential site of the intersection between the flexible specialization of post-Fordist production and the free-floating ideologemes-turned-syntax of postmodernism, the transgressive energies and subversive formal practices that first animated and defined %film noir% may be most alive and well in a new and even perverse combination with other similarly deracinated formal and thematic elements from other ex- genres of film. In contrast to classic %noir%, which was non- or even anti-domestic, this newer %noir% includes, and indeed is centered on, home and family, even as it decenters and problematizes both. Through a look at two successful recent films, _Blue Velvet_ and _Terminator 2_, I mean to show how home and family are being destabilized, "%noir%-ized" in both--dissolved into a semic flow or play of boundaries from which, paradoxically, those same categories re-emerge with renewed half-life. --FP Tessa Dora Addison and Audrey Extavasia, "Fucking (With Theory) for Money: Toward an Interrogation of Escort Prostitution" ABSTRACT: This essay is intended as an introductory interrogation of the terrain of escort prostitution, mobilizing terms from both _The Telephone Book_ by Avital Ronell and _A Thousand Plateaus_ by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. --TDA & AE Donald F. Theall, "Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace" ABSTRACT: _Finnegans Wake_ articulates a radical modernist or postmodernist theory of poetics and communication, based on gesture and tactility, essential to understanding cyberspace and the limitations of the orality/literacy dichotomy. Joyce's impact upon theorists like Derrida, Eco, or McLuhan contributes to understanding the development of VR out of electromechanical technologies and high modernism. --DFT Walter Kalaidjian, "Mainlining Postmodernism: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and the Art of Intervention" ABSTRACT: Taking up the "new times" of postmodernity, this essay considers the political resources and limits of cultural critique afforded by Kruger's appropriation of advertising signage and Holzer's work in light emitting diode board technology, both within museum culture and at street level. The essay compares their interventions to the more communal, socioaesthetic praxes of Greenpeace and ACT UP. --WK Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity: Scientism and Sadism" ABSTRACT: The project of this essay is to provide a theoretical basis for ethical-political resistance to postmodern perversity. Through a comparison of Deleuze & Guattari's (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus_ to de Sade's prototypical deconstructionism, this essay traces the nature and consequences of the circulation of desire in a postmodern order of things (an order implicitly modeled on a repressed archetype of the new physics' fluid particle flows), and it reveals a complicity between scientism, which underpins the postmodern condition, and the sadism of incessant deconstruction, which heightens the intensity of the pleasure-seeking moment in postmodernism. --PM ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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. 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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 592 FOR PMC 2.3-----------------