Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v6n01 (September 1995) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n01-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 6, Number 1 (September, 1995) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Stuart Moulthrop, issue ed. Eyal Amiran Lisa Brawley John Unsworth Review Editor: Jim English Managing Editor: Sarah Wells List Manager: Chris Barrett Editorial Board: Sharon Bassett Chimalum Nwankwo Michael Berube Patrick O'Donnell Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff Lisa Douglas Fred Pfeil Graham Hammill Mark Poster Phillip Brian Harper David Porush David Herman Carl Raschke bell hooks Avital Ronell E. Ann Kaplan Susan Schultz Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett William Spanos Arthur Kroker Gary Lee Stonum Neil Larsen Tony Stewart Tan Lin Chris Straayer Jerome McGann Rei Terada Jim Morrison Paul Trembath Larysa Mykata Greg Ulmer Phil Novak ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS TITLE FILENAME Stephanie Barbe Hammer, "'Just like hammer.995 Eddie' or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama" Stephen Barker, "Nietzsche/Derrida, barker.995 Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable" Daniel White and Gert Hellerich, "Nietzsche white.995 at the Altar: Deconstructing the Devotee" Peter Consenstein, "Memory and Oulipian consen.995 Constraints" Jeffrey T. Nealon, "'Junk' and the Other: nealon.995 Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs" Tony Thwaites, "Facing Pages: On Response, thwaites.995 A Response to Steven Helmling" Charles Woodman and Scott Davenport, woodman.995 "Plunder Squad" RELATED READINGS [WWW version only] POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN: Rhonda Garelick, "Outrageous Dieting: pop-cult.995 The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons" REVIEWS: Crystal Bartolovich, "Have Theory; Will review-1.995 Travel: Constructions of "Cultural Geography." Review of Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, eds., Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Tamise Van Pelt, "Queering Freud in Freiburg." review-2.995 Review of The Twelfth Annual Conference in Literature and Psychology. June 21-24, 1995, Freiburg, Germany. Kristine Butler, "Bordering on Fiction: review-3.995 Chantal Akerman's _D'Est_." Review of Chantal Akerman's _D'Est_, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. June 18-August 27. Steve Martinot, "Spectors of Sartre: Nancy's review-4.995 Romance with Ontological Freedom." Review of Jean-Luc Nancy, _The Experience of Freedom_. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. Rob Wilkie, "Postmodernism as Usual: 'Theory' review-5.995 in the American Academy Today." Review of Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, _Theory as Resistance_. New York: Guilford Press, 1994. Nickola Pazderic, "Hard Bodies." Review of review-6.995 Susan Jeffords _Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era_. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994, and Peter Lehman. _Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body_. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. x, 237 pp. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "The Cult of Print." review-7.995 Review of Sven Birkerts, _The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age_. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994. LETTERS: Selected Letters from Readers letters.995 NOTICES: Announcements and Advertisements notices.995 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Special thanks to Dan Ancona and Rick Provine ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Stephanie Barbe Hammer, "'Just like Eddie' or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama" ABSTRACT: A feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and roll culture bandwagon, I grab the wheel and track Greil Marcus' assumption that rock culture provides a crucial set of metaphors for thinking about high culture. This essay argues that Eddie Vedder (lead singer-composer for PEARL JAM), French theorist Roland Barthes, and German writer Peter Handke have upped the ante in the contemporary crisis of masculinity through frantic, frenetic and deeply ironic autobiographical performances. At the same time they struggle to complete, kill off, and have done with the modern -- an act which assumes the shape of loving and mourning "mother." Unabashed narcissists just like Eddie, Roland Barthes and Peter Handke go as far as boys can; owners of the phallus, they enact the vaginal wound in their go arounds with mother and with the mother tongue; they court abjection for our wonder, and dream of a freedom which must always fail. - SH Stephen Barker, "Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable" ABSTRACT: Is it possible to walk the tightrope between the condensation of poetic prose and the terseness of academic discourse? Can one conceive of doing so without committing oneself to a performance of the sort of language required of each? This piece launches itself directly into the core of this dilemma, trying to balance itself somewhere between the scholarship required to explore the Nietzsche/Derrida bond and the poetry inherent in the minimal texts of Beckett and Blanchot. Investigating the nature of the fragment and the aphorism in the worlds imagined by each of these artists, the essay stretches itself across the abyssal marketplace of paramodern meaning. Starting from the interrogation of subject-positions in all four of these writers, proceeding through an analysis of the tendentiousness of fragmentation as a function of aesthetic construction, the essay demonstrates how in _The Gay Science_, some of Derrida's essays, Blanchot's _The Step Not Beyond_ and Beckett's _How It Is_ and _The Unnamable_, the conjoint theme of self-parody operates to reverse and undermine the modernist tradition. - SB Daniel R. White and Gert Hellerich, "Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee" ABSTRACT: This essay argues that Nietzsche's critique of Christianity may be connected, via Bataille, Bateson, Derrida et al., with his critical vision of modernization, so as to reveal and genealogically situate the metaphysical bases of Western neoimperialism: including Eurocentrism, militarism, scientism and patriarchy. In order to practice a critical, recursive epistemology, the essay is cast in the form of a philosophical drama set (anachronistically) at a nine inch nails concert during the Gulf War. Nietzsche and others appear as characters on stage, introduced by a Narrator. Their dialogue is intertextual. Application of Nietzsche's critique to popular culture in the US, particularly as revealed in Kellner's _The Persian Gulf TV War_, exposes the idolatry and imagology of American self-righteousness: a secular religion of "power over" the Other. As an alternative, Nietzsche's philosophy of laughter is combined with Bateson's theory of play and Cixous' %jouissance% to propose a cultural semiotics of immanent divinity where the transcendent god returns to the interplay of communicative practice in an electronic renaissance. Thus the hierarchic scheme of domination is to be transformed into the mutual celebration of life through %die frohliche Wissenschaft%: the Joyous Science. - DW Peter Consenstein, "Memory and Oulipian Constraint" ABSTRACT: Founded originally in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, the group Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle -- The Workshop of Potential Literature) uses structural constraints as its method to generate texts. Pre-existent structures, the sonnet for example, are often at the base of the group member's constraints, and I am advancing the notion that the oulipian text's conscientiously designed structures help the reader to remember the story being told. Since literary history serves as the original stockpile for contemporary constraints, the oulipian text also helps the reader to remember past literature. However, the act of innovation on past structures simultaneously destroys and recalls, thus creating a tense fault line between the past and the present. My analysis of Jacques Roubaud's _La Boucle_, Georges Perec's _La vie mode d'emploi_, and Italo Calvino's _If on a winter's night a traveler_ concentrates on the constraints that drive their novels, and discusses how, according to oulipian credo, the constraints are integral to the stories being related. Faced with postmodern theory, I suggest that their creations are more than early examples of postmodern "%ecriture%" because the constraints they adhere to expand the limits of their creativity. The oulipian text, therefore, is invested with the author's search for self, or a part of his or her soul, because it relates a test of his or her creative limits. Finally, I give evidence that their constraints resemble the mnemotechniques of medieval writing. Having philologically linked their constraints to the underlying construct of medieval texts, I attempt to situate oulipian writing theoretically. Is it truly an example of that which we call postmodern, or, more obtusely, is it not an author's soulful attempt to reclaim and profit from the technical and formal elements of writing? - PC Jeffrey T. Nealon, "'Junk' and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs" ABSTRACT: This essay takes up the ethical imperatives of infinite desire in Levinas and Burroughs. For Levinas, the desire at play in the encounter with the other person is a "%sens unique%," an unrecoverable movement outward, a one-way direction: a "movement of the Same toward the Other which never returns to the Same." As Burroughs's Sailor reminds us, however, there may be no better description of addiction: "Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can't go back no more." Burroughs's exterior movements encounter an other that is other to the Levinasian widow, stranger or orphan -- an other, finally, that is other to the human and the privileges of the human that the philosophical discourse of ethics all-too-often takes for granted. This essay will attempt to track what happens when Levinas's humanism of the other person comes face-to-face with junk, with what Burroughs calls "the face of 'evil' [that] is always the face of total need." - JN ----------------------------------------------------------------- PMC-MOO: The editors of _Postmodern Culture_ gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Lisa Brawley, Bill Garrett, Craig Horman, Mark Nunes, Heather Wagner, Ted Whalen, and Shawn Wilbur, who run PMC-MOO, the journal's text-based virtual reality facility. To connect to PMC-MOO telnet to hero.village.virginia.edu and log in as "pmcdemo"; hit the "enter" key when prompted for a password. At the MOO welcome screen, type "connect guest" and hit "enter." 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