Postmodern Culture Table of Contents v6n03 (May 1996) URL = http://infomotions.com/serials/pmc/pmc-v6n03-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 3 (May, 1996) ISSN: 1053-1920 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Editors: Eyal Amiran Lisa Brawley Stuart Moulthrop, issue editor John Unsworth Review Editor: Jim English Paula Geyh Managing Editor: Sarah Wells List Manager: Jessamy Town Editorial Board: Sharon Bassett Phil Novak Michael Berube Chimalum Nwankwo Nahum Chandler Patrick O'Donnell Marc Chenetier Elaine Orr Greg Dawes Marjorie Perloff Lisa Douglas Fred Pfeil Graham Hammill Peggy Phelan Phillip Brian Harper David Porush David Herman Mark Poster bell hooks Carl Raschke E. Ann Kaplan Avital Ronell Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Susan Schultz Arthur Kroker William Spanos Neil Larsen Tony Stewart Tan Lin Allucquere Roseanne Stone Saree Makdisi Gary Lee Stonum Jerome McGann Chris Straayer Uppinder Mehan Rei Terada Jim Morrison Paul Trembath Larysa Mykata Greg Ulmer ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS TITLE FILENAME Stephen A. Fredman, "'How to Get fredman.596 Out of the Room That Is the Book?' Paul Auster and the Consequences of Confinement" Scott Schaffer, "Disney and the schaffer.596 Imagineering of Histories" Wes Chapman, "Male Pro-Feminism chapman.596 and the Masculinist Gigantism of _Gravity's Rainbow_" Charles Shepherdson, "The shepherdson.596 Intimate Alterity of the Real" Adrian Miles, "Hyperweb" miles.596 (hypertext) Chris Semansky, "Youngest Brother semansky.596 of Brothers" Cory Brown, "My Name in Water," brown.596 "Adumbration," "Offering," and "Depth Perception" RELATED READINGS [WWW Version only] POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN: Andrew McMurry, "The Slow pop-cult.596 Apocalypse: A Gradualist Theory of the World's Demise" REVIEWS: James Berger, "Ends and Means: review-1.596 Theorizing Apocalypse in the 1990's." Review of Lee Quinby, _Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism_ (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994), Stephen D. O'Leary, _Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric_, (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), Richard Dellamora, _Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending_ (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994). Kenneth Sherwood, "A Millennial Poetics." review-2.596 Review of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., _Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (Volume One: From Finde Sie'cle to Negritude)_. Berkeley U of California P, 1995. Joe Amato, "Personal Effects, Public Effects, review-3.596 Special Effects: Institutionalizing American Poetry." Review of Jed Rasula, _The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990_. National Council of Teachers of English. Anjali Arondekar, "The Problem of Strategy: review-4.596 How to Read Race, Gender, and Class in the Colonial Context." Review of Anne McClintock, _Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest_. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kelly Cresap, "Bisexuals, Cyborgs, and review-5.596 Chaos." Review of Marjorie Garber, _Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life_. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Mark Shadle, "Schama and the New Histories of review-6.596 Landscape." Review of Simon Schama, _Landscape and Memory_. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995. LETTERS: Selected Letters from Readers letters.596 NOTICES: Announcements and Advertisements notices.596 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACTS Stephen Fredman, "'How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book?': Paul Auster and the Consequences of Confinement" ABSTRACT: In his novels, poetry, and memoir, Paul Auster explores a primary image of "the room of the book," which figures the space of writing as a place where life and writing meet in an unstable, creative, and sometimes dangerous encounter. Focusing especially on _The Invention of Solitude_, this essay examines the room of the book through three interpretive frameworks that help to make its dimensions apprehensible. These frameworks represent dynamic issues that arise from within the room of the book, issues that account for some of the characteristic complexities of Auster's work: 1) a contest between prose and poetry that colors much of his writing; 2) a parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity that he constructs with great effort; and 3) a pervasive preoccupation with Holocaust imagery. Auster's room of the book houses a fascinating struggle between the absolutizing qualities of poetry and the narrative investment in fictional characters; it functions for the male writer both as a site of retreat from engagement with women and as an alchemical retort in which a parthenogenic theory of creativity can be proposed; and it becomes a space of hiding and torment, in which the irresolvable problems of writing with reference to the Holocaust can be embodied. In Auster's prose, the postmodern inquiry into the relationship between writing and identity metamorphoses into a confrontation with a series of gender issues, oriented around the father, and then metamorphoses again into an interrogation of the particularly Jewish concern with memory. Using memory to probe the ruptures in contemporary life, Auster returns ultimately to the unspeakable memories of the Holocaust, thus laying bare ways in which the postmodern is inescapably post-Holocaust. -SF Scott Schaffer, "Disney and the Imagineering of Histories" ABSTRACT: Starting with the implicit assumption that the products of the mass media play an important part in the everyday consciousness of the people who consume these products, this paper argues that the animated films and the theme parks created by the Walt Disney Company establish what I call a "boundary maintenance mechanism" in its American consumers. By engaging in a textual analysis of three of Disney's animated films (_The Three Caballeros_, _The Jungle Book_, and _Aladdin_), as well as a textual analysis that draws on ethnographic fieldwork done while I was employed at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, I utilize the writings of Fanon on "black consciousness" to argue that the inscription of American political and cultural imperial discourses into stories derived from local colonial situations serves as a way of thinking as a "white American." That is, Disney's products provide, through the development of their culture of consumption and at the level of the political unconscious, a consciousness of how their consumers *should* perceive themselves as proper "Americans" according to their place in the world. The boundary produced by this political unconscious is coterminous with the expansion of American cultural, political, and economic power. Continued consumption, guaranteed by the veritable wealth of local stories as well as the continual recycling of older animated films, ensures the stability of this political unconscious. -SS Wes Chapman, "Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of _Gravity's Rainbow_" ABSTRACT: This essay examines the intersections between male gender anxiety and anti-essentialism in Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_, in an effort to assess the viability of anti-essentialism as a political strategy for male anti-masculinists. Within the novel, sexuality is shown to be conditioned by pornographic discourses so as to ensure that subjects of the state respond sexually to scenes of violence and domination and are thus complicit with the War's "structures favoring death." Because subjectivities -- including, presumably, the author's and reader's -- are constructed by this intersection of masculinism and militarism, Pynchon's critique of them operates from within the very ideologies that it critiques. Pynchon's method is not to disengage from the complex of masculinism and militarism, but rather to write it out in extra large letters, so that its operation is made visible and its energies may be used against it. While Pynchon's strategy makes masculinism visible, however, it also reinscribes the very masculinism it critiques and decenters women's perspectives. The essay concludes by arguing that while anti-essentialism has been a necessary strategy for a male profeminist politics, it is not a sufficient strategy. Strategies and discourses are needed which take account of men's positions within social discourses and go beyond gesturing towards male complicity with oppressive structures to work towards new subjectivities which reconcile male self-fulfillment with recognition of women as subjects. -WC Charles Shepherdson, "The Intimate Alterity of the Real" ABSTRACT: This article addresses the relation between the symbolic and the real in Lacan, and was written in response to readers's comments on an earlier piece published in _Postmodern Culture_. Interpreters often stress Lacan's emphasis on language and the symbolic order, noting his dependence on Saussure and Levi-Strauss, but the concept of the real introduces issues that classical structuralism was not intended to address -- matters of sexuality and embodiment that take Freudian theory beyond linguistics. It is tempting to maintain that the category of the real introduces an appeal to biology, or to a pre-linguistic reality that language only partially and inadequately represents. My principal claim is that the real is not equivalent to pre-linguistic reality, but is an effect of the symbolic order that nevertheless remains irreducible to language. I address this problem in three related ways. The first concerns the logic of "inside and outside," and the question of whether the real is within language (constituted by the symbolic, as many proponents of discursive construction would claim), or somehow beyond language. This section also deals with Lacan's topological references, and draws connections between topology and the body. Current discussions of the "inside" and "outside" are heavily indebted to Derrida, and I suggest that his relation to Lacan calls for more extended analysis. Second, I discuss the "limits of formalization," arguing that the category of the real introduces a remainder or surplus-effect that disrupts the symbolic law, thereby posing the question of whether -- and in what sense -- Lacan is a "post-structuralist." This section also considers the "object a," the "cause of desire," and "jouissance" (as well as making some remarks on transference), as aspects of the real. The expression "limits of formalization" suggests that these issues arise for many other thinkers who are concerned with the logical impasses of structuralism (notably Foucault and Derrida). The final section distinguishes two distinct versions of the real (as a pre-linguistic reality that is always lost when the imaginary and symbolic re-present it, and as a surplus-effect of symbolization itself), suggesting why the second is more accurate. This section also discusses recent work by Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek. -CS HYPERTEXT ESSAY Adrian Miles, "Hyperweb" ABSTRACT: When we write *about* electronic textuality, most of us remain *ab*stract from and *out*side our subject, since scholarship is still happily married to fixed typography. Lately, however, especially with the appearance of groundbreaking academic projects like Alan Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" (http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/ humanitas_home.html), one begins to wonder about the old hearth and home. Adrian Miles' "performative" essay on the nature of hypertext dallies temptingly with some possibilities of discourse post-print. A moving matrix of words and images, it makes inquiry into the message of an emerging, emergent medium. Like hypertexts featured previously in _Postmodern Culture_, this one requires active "navigation" of the text; but because it exploits an interesting affordance of Hypertext Markup Language -- the curiously simple "client pull" effect -- the sensation is less of steering than of swimming against a tide. You'll reach the shore eventually -- but where? This you will find out; but first some technical advice: Your Web browser must be capable of interpreting the HTML tag. Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 and versions of Netscape Navigator later than 1.1 can do this. (You should still be able to read the text with other software, but the dynamics will be lost.) You can interrupt the automatic transitions in the text at any point by moving to some page outside of "Hyperweb." If you're reading this in Australia or New Zealand, you're invited to visit "Hyperweb" at its original location (http://www.ss.rmit.edu.au/miles/hyperweb/). THANKS TO JOHN DAN JOHNSON-EILOLA OF PURDUE UNIVERSITY FOR HIS TIMELY HELP WITH THIS PROJECT. -- Stuart Moulthrop ----------------------------------------------------------------- PMC-MOO: The editors of _Postmodern Culture_ gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Bill Garrett, Craig Horman, Mark Nunes, Heather Wagner, Ted Whalen, and Shawn Wilbur, who run PMC-MOO, the j ournal'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." If you have your own MOO client, point it at: hero.village.virginia.edu 7777 ----------------------------------------------------------------- POSTMODERN CULTURE is published by Oxford University Press three times a year (September, January, and May). 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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 and of the publisher. --------------END OF CONTENTS.596 for PMC 6.3--------------------