Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v3n03 (May 1993) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v3n03-contents.txt ------------------------------ Cut here ------------------------------ 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 3, Number 3 (May, 1993) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Eyal Amiran John Unsworth, Issue Editor Review Editor: Jim English Managing Editor: Nancy Cooke List Manager: Chris Barrett Editorial Assistants: Jonathan Beasley John Hoback 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, and instructions for CONTENTS.593 retrieving files Roberto Maria Dainotto, "The Excremental Sublime: DAINOTTO.593 The Postmodern Literature of Blockage and Release" Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and HELMLING.593 Eagleton" Eric Selinger, "It Meant I Loved: Louise Gluck's SELINGER.593 _Ararat_" "Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation ANTIN.593 with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean" Nathaniel Bobbitt, "Xenakis Letters" BOBBITT.593 George Aichele, "Reading Beyond Meaning" AICHELE.593 Kip Canfield, "The Microstructure of CANFIELD.593 Logocentrism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky" POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN: Susan Suleiman, "Can You Go Home Again? POP-CULT.593 A Budapest Diary, 1992" REVIEWS: Tim Watson, "Comrade Gramsci's Progeny." REVIEW-1.593 Review of Antonio Gramsci, _Prison Notebooks, vol. 1_, David Harris, _From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure_, and Renate Holub, _Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism_. J. Russell Perkin, "Theorizing the Culture REVIEW-2.593 Wars." Review of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., _Loose Canons_, Gerald Graff, _Beyond the Culture Wars_, and William V. Spanos, _The End of Education_. Leslie Regan Shade, "Women and Television." REVIEW-3.593 Review of Lynn Spigel, _Make Room for TV_, and Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, eds., _Private Screenings_. Debra Silverman, "Playing With Clothes." REVIEW-4.593 Review of Marjorie Garber, _Vested Interests_. Simon Carter, "Risk and the New Modernity." REVIEW-5.593 Review of Ulrich Bech, _Risk Society_. Eric Rabkin, "CyFy PoMo?" Review of David REVIEW-6.593 Ketterer, _Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy_ and Larry McCaffery, _Storming the Reality Studio_. Lahoucine Ouzgane, "Women and Islam." Review REVIEW-7.593 of Leila Ahmed, _Women and Gender in Islam_. NOTICES: Announcements and Advertisements NOTICES.593 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Roberto Maria Dainotto, "The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern Literature of Blockage and Release" ABSTRACT: Concerned primarily with American fiction, this essay reflects on the sublime as the defining feature of postmodern literature and discourse. From Longinus to Kant, the sublime, a complexly aesthetic and social category at once, has been described as the individual's confrontation with a superior force that momentarily marks the disruption of the subject, which is later reconstituted in a state of sublime ecstasy and self-reaffirmation. From its very outset, postmodern literature partakes of this paradigm: the "exhaustion" of literary possibilities considered by John Barth, as well as the "loss of the self" announced by Wylie Sypher, present a "momentary check" to a postmodern imagination which has to confront a tantalizing modernist literary tradition and a totalizing social order--a check that will be ironically overcome at the very moment a newly reconstituted subject will be able to "replenish" literature with new tropes, new stories, fictions, and fables of identity. In the end, postmodern imagination and individuality will come out "sublimated" into a new position, alternative to traditional aesthetics and metaphysics, as left-overs, excrements of the symbolic order of both society and literature. --RD Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton" ABSTRACT: A study of how Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton differ on the issue of "pleasure," with special attention to the relation between their substantive differences and the textual effects (satisfactions, or "pleasures") of their very different prose styles. Jameson's prose enacts a "vision" of "inevitable failure" that, Jameson argues, is incumbent, generically, on any "dialectical" criticism as such; Eagleton scorns any "defeatist" or "pessimistic" rhetoric, yet slyly recommends Jameson's tortured writing precisely for the "profound pleasure" it offers. How does (or should) "pleasure" manifest in Marxist writing? Jameson's "Pleasure: A Political Issue" proposes (via a reading of Barthes's _Pleasure of the Text_) a redescription of Marxist pleasure as a version of "the sublime," but in the process inverts some hallowed Marxist themes, while Eagleton's manifesto for a "Marxist theory of comedy" in "Carnival and Comedy: Bakhtin and Brecht" unexpectedly founders on a pessimism at odds with Eagleton's avowed "optimism of the will." Such tensions and contradictions indicate the limits, the possibilities and predicaments, of the rhetorical or libidinal resources available to Marxist critique in our historical moment. --SH Eric Selinger, "It Meant I Loved: Louise Gluck's _Ararat_" ABSTRACT: According to Kristeva, an "erosion" of imaginary paternity has undermined contemporary love. In its uneasy family portraits, Louise Gluck's _Ararat_ traces one speaker's progress out of this postmodern melancholy. Rather than replace the old codes of romance with the "work-in-progress" of imaginative play, Gluck embraces a cycle of idealization, disappointment, and forgiveness. Pressing her language to a dry, antipoetic limit she turns the plot of a mass-media lament into memorable and particular verse. --ES "Talking and Thinking: David Antin in Conversation with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean" ABSTRACT: An edited transcript of an interview with David Antin by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, in San Diego, February 1992. In the interview, Antin talks about language, art, thought, and the methods and principles of his verbal improvisation. The interview took place shortly after a performance by Antin in San Francisco, on the subject of _the other_. --[ed.] George Aichele, "Reading Beyond Meaning" ABSTRACT: The traditional logocentric understanding of text is a theological one; it is the "theology of the Text" (Derrida) which postmodern %differance% refuses. A postmodern theology of reading does not view text as a "work" or property, governed by an ethics and an economics, ideal meaning incarnated in various bodies. Instead, text is uncovered as a material thing, formed of meaningless letters, on which readers violently impose meaning. Three limit-conditions which define reading are the non-reader (Calvino), literal translation (Benjamin), and materialist reading (Barthes, Belo). These point toward a concrete theology, a "reading against the grain," which can never be completely realized. --GA Kip Canfield, "The Microstructure of Logocentrism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky" ABSTRACT: This paper explores a remarkable parallelism in stories about the theory of the sign in the usually isolated discourses of the humanities and the cognitive sciences. It presents a close reading of two works, "Linguistics and Grammatology," Chapter 2 of _Of Grammatology_ by Jacques Derrida, and "On the proper treatment of connectionism" by Paul Smolensky. Both Derrida and Smolensky want to give a fuller, more complex, and dynamic vision of the signifying human. Smolensky explicitly appeals to presence as a field in dynamic systems theory. Derrida precisely defines such a field with the terms "trace" and "differance," but denies their reality because he rejects the idea of global control over all the atoms of signification. The fundamental target of these critiques is the static character of structuralist or objectivist accounts of signification. Both authors also note a semantic problem for sign models that requires a mysterious "semantic shift" from the unconscious to the conscious. This semantic anomaly does not allow intuitive access to the basis of the sign model. Derrida sees this as an insurmountable mystery while Smolensky thinks it can be penetrated. --KC ---------------------------------------------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS LISTSERV: NB: The Unix Listserv program does not accept the "f=mail" switch after get requests. Those of you who are familiar with the VM listserv procedures should NOT continue to use "f=mail" in your requests to the Unix Listserv. Likewise, the "package files" which we used with the VM Listserv to retrieve the entire issue with a one-line command are no longer available, but see the ftp instructions, below, for an easy way to retrieve the entire issue. To retrieve the items listed in the table of contents, send a mail message to listserv@listserv.ncsu.edu, containing as its one and only line the command get pmc-list [fn.ft] (replace [fn.ft] with the filename and filetype for the file you want to receive, as listed in the table of contents). 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When you have logged in, type: cd pub\docs\pmc\pmc-list To make sure that the ftp program expects to transfer ascii text, type ascii at this point. Now you can transfer individual files or groups of files. To transfer an individual file--for example, this table of contents--type: get contents.593 Note that, although the filenames are listed above in uppercase letters, for readability, the ftp program is case-sensitive, and you will probably need to use only lowercase letters when you ask ftp for PMC files. To transfer a group of files--for example, the entire May, 1993 issue of PMC--type: mget *.593 When you're done with your file tranfer, type "quit" to return to your own command prompt. 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