SUNY series in Postmodern Culture – serie

Examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time.This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term "Surfiction" for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

Explores the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.We are haunted by what we cannot fully identify, by what we cannot make identical to what we already are, have, and know. AIDS is visible, as is the South Central Los Angeles riot/revolt, the dead eyes of Amy Fisher, the pubic hair in Clarence Thomas' Coke, the Branch Davidian Compound shimmering in the distance, and much more. The intensity of all this does not escape the general public. Popular film plugs into this haunting power because it attracts a mass audience. This book is about what haunts the headlines as well as the Big Screen in America during 1990-1992.

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.Spectacular Vernaculars examines hip-hop's cultural rebellion in terms of its specific implications for postmodern theory and practice, using the politics of reception as its primary rhetorical ground. Hip-hop culture in general, and rap music in particular, present model sites for such an inquiry, since they enact both postmodern modes of production-the appropriation of tropes, technologies, and material culture-and a potential means of resistance to the commodification of cultural forms under late capitalism. By paying specific attention to the historical and cultural context of hip-hop as a black artform and locating its practice of resistance in terms of a postmodernist reading of consumer culture, this book offers a complex reading of hip-hop as a postmodern practice, with implications both for theories of postmodernism and cultural studies as a whole.

Using a "cultural studies" approach to the question of what constitutes literary study at the end of the twentieth century, the contributors address identity politics in specific cultural instances.The sixteen original essays by scholars from around the world examine concerns common to writers who experience marginalization based upon their inescapable identification with two or more cultures. From Australian aboriginal and Maori, to Irish, Maghrebian, and South African, and on to the rich ethnic mix in North America, the book considers fiction, poetry, autobiography, and anthropological reportage to raise questions as determinative as one's choice of language, one's presentation of self in society, one's "recovery" of a history. This collection serves as a bridge between recent Eurocentric postmodern discourse dealing with the breakdown of the modernist stability in art, architecture, and electronic media, and those recent studies that problematize the issue of racial identity and literary practice.Cross-Addressing discusses site-specific strategies of resistance to the imposition of identity in the terms imposed or implied by colonizers and their descendants: narrative empowerment, gender reconstruction, racial decategorization, an intersection of marginalities, and a cross-cultural Third World solidarity. The movement is from the individual to the collective, from the particular to the global. The theoretical approach is eclectic, echoing the current split in cultural studies between discussions of the cultural production of meaning, and an involvement in policy debates. The book contends that the heightened consciousness resulting from marginalization not only judges our world, but offers it a window onto its future possibilities. Contributors include Lyn McCredden, Suzette Henke, Trevor James, Mary O'Connor, S.M., Nejd Yaziji, Rosemary Jolly, Bernice Zamora, Gayle Wald, Arturo Aldama, Manuel M. Martín-Rodríquez, Barbara Frey Waxman, Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Lien Chao, Karin Quimby, and Roger Bromley.

Examines popular films made in Hollywood by European directors, offering a fresh take on the much-debated issue of the "great divide" between modernism and mass culture.CHOICE 1999 Outstanding Academic BooksIn Passport to Hollywood, James Morrison examines a series of Hollywood films by directors from European art-cinemas. Drawing widely on current research in film theory, film history, and cultural studies, he traces the influence of European filmmakers in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1980s and illuminates the relation between modernism and mass-culture in American movies. By interpreting important American films, Morrison also shows how these films illustrate key issues of cultural hierarchy and national culture over fifty years of American cinema. In addition, he explores the complex and often contradictory ways that these Hollywood movies conceptualize ideas about "foreignness." Using insightful close viewings, Morrison demonstrates new connections among modernism, postmodernism, and American movies.

Takes up a series of literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from Christian saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to contemporary s/m practices.Counterpleasures takes up a series of literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to leathersex. Each is placed in its cultural context to unfold a history of transgressive pleasure and to argue for the value and power of such pleasures as resistant to more totalizing forms of power.

Explores contemporary uses of letters and letter writing—including electronic mail—in literature, film, and art.While the advent and structure of electronic mail has been discussed in web caucuses, newspapers, hypertext theory, and communication theory, it has not yet been considered in conjunction with epistolary scenarios in film, art, and literature. To address this gap, Mail-Orders explores the status of the epistolary form at the end of the twentieth century and its connections to feminist criticism, literary theory, and postmodernism. One of the first works to consider electronic mail in relation to the history of epistolary fiction, Mail-Orders concerns itself with individual letters, as well as fiction written in letter form, and widens the debate on the often postulated "death of letters" by considering the epistolary connections between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries' systems of communication and representation.

Explores and critiques the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment as a convention in twentieth-century American fiction, from the standpoint of postmodernism.In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or "epiphany," in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains how the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.

Explores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness. Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability. In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

An introduction to the philosophical, economic, historical, feminist, and cultural versions of post-Marxist theory.Poststructuralist Marxism, or post-Marxism, is a theoretical viewpoint that elaborates and revises the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Unlike traditional Marxism, which emphasizes the priority of class struggle and the common humanity of oppressed groups, post-Marxism reveals the sexual, racial, class, and ethnic divisions of modern Western society. This book surveys the different versions of post-Marxist theory: the economic theory of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, the historical methodology of Michel Foucault, the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the feminism of Judith Butler, the materialist philosophy of Pierre Macherey, and the cultural studies of Tony Bennett and John Frow. Providing a coherent framework for these otherwise quite divergent theorists, Philip Goldstein outlines the history of Marxist philosophical or theoretical views and explains how they all count as post-Marxist.

Explores the role and function of the autopsy in Western culture, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lecture to The X-Files and CSI.In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth Klaver considers how autopsies are performed in a variety of contexts, from the "real" thing in hospitals and county morgues to various depictions in paintings, novels, plays, films, and television shows. Autopsies can serve a variety of pedagogical, legal, scientific, and social functions, and the autopsied cadaver, Klaver shows, has lately become one of the most spectacular bodies offered up to the public on film, television, and the Internet. Setting her discussion within the history of the modern autopsy, and including the narrative of her own attendance at a medical autopsy, Klaver makes the autopsy readable in a number of diverse venues, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson and Vesalius's Fabrica to The Silence of the Lambs, The X-Files, and CSI. Moving from the actual autopsy itself to its broader symbolic ramifications, Klaver addresses questions as disparate as the social constructedness of the body, the perception and treatment of death under late capitalism, and the ubiquity of paranoia in contemporary culture.

Moves from Beethoven to Buffy to examine the blurred nexus of elite and popular culture in the twenty-first century.What happens when Theodor Adorno, the champion of high, classical artists such as Beethoven, comes into contact with the music of Chuck Berry, the de facto king of rock 'n' roll? In a series of readings and meditations, Robert Miklitsch investigates the postmodern nexus between elite and popular culture as it occurs in the audiovisual fields of film, music, and television-ranging from Gershwin to gangsta rap, Tarantino to Tongues Untied, Tony Soprano to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Miklitsch argues that the aim of critical theory in the new century will be to describe and explain these commodities in ever greater phenomenological detail without losing touch with those evaluative criteria that have historically sustained both Kulturkritik and classical aesthetics.

Explores the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.We are haunted by what we cannot fully identify, by what we cannot make identical to what we already are, have, and know. AIDS is visible, as is the South Central Los Angeles riot/revolt, the dead eyes of Amy Fisher, the pubic hair in Clarence Thomas' Coke, the Branch Davidian Compound shimmering in the distance, and much more. The intensity of all this does not escape the general public. Popular film plugs into this haunting power because it attracts a mass audience. This book is about what haunts the headlines as well as the Big Screen in America during 1990-1992.

A study of the "returned gaze" from the cinema screen, demonstrating that the films that we watch watch us, guide us, control our gaze, and enforce societal codesThis book is a study of one of the most insidious and pervasive phenomena in the study and reception of cinema: the "returned gaze" from the screen, in which the audience is actually surveilled by the film being projected on the screen. Rather than the usual process of watching a film, in those films which return the gaze of the viewer, the film looks at us, confronting our voyeur's embrace of the spectacle it presents. The book cites examples as diverse as Andy Warhol's Vinyl, Laurel and Hardy two-reel comedies, the films of Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and Wesley E. Barry's Creation of the Humanoids. It also discusses the history of the returned gaze in video, pornography, surveillance systems, and the related plastic arts.

Explores the consequences of postmodern theory and answers the question, "What did postmodern theory begin?"In a series of topical explorations structured like a sonata, H. L. Hix identifies the consequences of postmodern theory through such issues as grief, freedom, beauty, obscenity, love, and sex to its axiological consequences. A basic motif, postmodernism's distribution of meaning over space rather than time, recurs throughout the chapters, each of which in some way amplifies the book's underlying theme, virtue. The "exposition" of the theme in the first ten chapters receives its "development" in the chapter, "Postmodern Virtue," and its "recapitulation" in the aphorisms of the final chapter.By choosing names like "deconstruction," postmodern theory postures as that which shakes foundations. But any declaration of an end is also a declaration of a beginning, and Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes pushes past the posturing to ask what foundations postmodern theory has laid.

Offers a radical, "Third World" approach to current debates on canon revision, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and reforms in education and culture.In Part One, the author examines what is at stake in the complex relations between theory and practice in exchanges involving Paul de Man, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and others. In Part Two, San Juan focuses on the materialist aesthetics of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, examining their resonance in a Hemingway novel and in the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. In Part Three, the author conducts an appraisal of James Baldwin's worldview, the textualization of the Asian diaspora in the United States, and the interface between postmodern themes and "postcolonial" sensibilities.The ultimate project of the author is to envision the emergence of a new field called "world cultural studies" from a radical "Third World" perspective. The transition from Western "hegemony" to the transformative, oppositional inquiry of "Others" epitomizes the itinerary of San Juan's exploration of the discipline once called litterae humaniores but now reconceived as the praxis of critical transgressions.

This book describes and examines the fear of exposure one faces when creating for cultural consumption. Examining the work of Cixous, Foucault, Irigaray, Spinoza, Hegel, Hakim Bey, Heidegger, Kathy Acker, Derrida, and Kierkegaard, the author finds spaces where fear and anxiety give way to connection and community.

Interprets postmodernity in relation to the body—the "somatological a priori," and applies current critical theory to issues of gender, popular culture fashion, and magic, as well as the Western philosophical/theological tradition.Covering a wealth of authors and literature from Baudrillard to Foucault, from Freud to Lacan, from Plato to Heidegger, from the study of women's fashion to Girardian perspectives on the sacrificial victim, Fire and Roses shows that the "postmodern theme" is something much more than the play of disconnection and diversity. Postmodernism is, in fact, a kind of "epistemology" of the somatic remainder that has been the "stranger" in the house of Western thought.

An innovative study of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy, relating the ethical to the problematic of the text as a post or a sending in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Kristeva, and Foucault, and phrasing the ethical as the questions of how to read and write after.Posts is a collection of original essays that relate the ethical to the problematic of the text as a post or a sending in the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault. What brings these diverse thinkers together here is the suggestion that something ethical happens (il arrive) through the text only if it is not a self-presentation. The book's innovative studies of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy phrase the ethical as the question of how to read and write after without either a decidable sender or a predetermined addressee. The collection will be of interest to all those concerned with ethics and with the ethical implications of recent developments in literary criticism, postmodern theory, psychoanalysis, architecture, feminism, philosophy, and religious studies.

Offers readable case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, showing disorganization as characteristic of postmodern times.Through informative, original, and incisive case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, this book demonstrates that disorganization and disaggregation characterize postmodern times. Postmodern phenomena, Leitch argues, resemble imploded geological formations with historical strata in kaleidoscopic disarray, and that neither economics, nor politics, nor culture escapes this novel form. Among the influential figures analyzed are Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, John Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Pentti Saarikoski, and Julian Schnabel.

This collection of feminist essays from a variety of disciplines explores the idea of the body as a site for the production of political ideologies.Bodily Discursions offers a multiplicity of feminist perspectives on the body, especially the female body, from a variety of disciplines: literary history, social theory, art history, cultural studies, the history of rhetoric, film, and literary criticism among others. Subjects range from public punishment of outspoken women during the English Renaissance to current responses to the AIDS pandemic in the popular media. Contributors include Alice E. Adams, Susanmarie Harrington, Catherine Hobbs, Cynthia Huff, Cathy Peppers, Roberta Schreyer, Julie Shaffer, Torri L. Thompson, Angela Wall, Deborah S. Wilson, and Christine Moneera Laennec.All of the essays offer variations on the same theme-the idea that the body is a site for the production of political ideologies, particularly in response to social exigencies and cultural crises. However, there is no single, over-arching ideological model here for feminism, much less for reading the body in a specific historical or cultural moment.Bodily Discursions offers instead a number of individual voices on a variety of issues and phenomena as they determine the configuration of the body. This book demonstrates that society needs to pay attention to how the body is manipulated if we are to work for social progress and political justice, for it is through our bodies that we all must articulate our experience and live our lives."This topic is on the cutting edge of scholarship in both feminist and cultural studies. It is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field." — Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario

Demonstrates that Dali's Surrealism anticipates postmodern tactics, and inaugurates "New Dali Studies" by offering an original interpretation of his relationship with the Surrealist canon.By taking Dali's "paranoiac-critical method" to the delirious extents Dali himself recommended, LaFountain demonstrates that Dali's Surrealism anticipates tactics practiced by postmodern and poststructural critics. In particular, LaFountain advances the notion that "phantom meaning" displaced Surrealism's "phantom object," thereby creating a crisis of the subject and the object far in excess of that sought by Surrealist revolutionaries. Focusing on Dali's magnificent painting, Endless Enigma, LaFountain inaugurates "New Dali Studies" by offering an original interpretation of Dali's close, yet strained, relationship with André Breton and the Surrealist canon.

Enacts and evokes the changes and creative possibilities emerging from contemporary literary technologies (electronic media).Bookend challenges distinctions between prose and poetry as well as between popular and academic culture, embodying a wide array of poetic techniques to argue that form and structure are themselves essential to artistic and cultural meaning. It critiques the current media environs, a hybrid reality in which the individual encounters his or her public and private selves in the midst of a crisis of values. Each of the five anatomies represents both a personal and a local account of where the author finds himself in social and educational terms, and an attempt is made throughout to situate this individual experience against a global imperative.

Explores notions of personal and cultural identity, and offers an introduction to the work of women in literature, film, dance, and visual art in Germany.This book introduces American audiences to Germany through the perspectives of members of various ethnic groups within the newly unified country and through the mediation of feminist scholars, documenting the artistic contributions to German cultural identity of ten women writers, filmmakers, dancers, and visual artists.The work of these artists is presented in various ways: as an opportunity for Germans to explore their own repressed identities, as a portrayal of the complex histories of cultural change which foreigners bring into Germany, as the work of piecing together a minority identity in Germany, as a portrayal of the marginalization of women in the construction of the nation, and as the interpenetration of Eastern and Western European cultures.These artists subvert the process of forming a singular cultural identity by calling into question the creation of a unified personal identity. They represent, for example, the fragmentation of identity through images of amputation, the arbitrary construction of identity through games of chance, the struggle within the writing self to resist censorship in East Germany, and the protest against a culturally imposed identity based on racial categorization.The volume's eleven articles address issues of multiculturalism, national and personal identity, and avant-garde art, and reflect on the various ways gender and culture interact in the German context.

Moves from the discourses of dialectical negation to cultural-populist affirmation—that is, from Hegel to Madonna Studies—in order to envision a mode of critique that can persuasively describe and explain the cultural contradictions of late capitalism.From Hegel to Madonna presents a genealogical survey of the discourses of negation and affirmation associated with the work of Hegel, Adorno, Deleuze, and Guattari; then, rotating from the philosophical to the political-economic axis, turns to the problem of a general economy of "commodity-fetishism." Drawing on the work of Marx and Freud, Miklitsch mobilizes a new, renewed understanding of "commodity fetishism"—what he calls the commodity-body-sign—in order to examine received notions of consumption and commodification. The aim is to envision a dialectical mode of critique, at once critical and affirmative, that can account for the cultural contradictions of late capitalism. The author also analyzes the phenomenon of Madonna Studies, reading the interest in the pop star as a sign of the academic times, a symptomatic figure not only of cultural studies in all its celebratory, cultural-populist excess but of a critical discourse responsive to postmodern culture in all its politically complex mutability.

Taking a post-psychoanalytic, queer-theoretical approach, this book links philosophical and aesthetic issues in two distinct periods through the examination of a variety of imaginative texts, from canonical poetry and fiction to avant-garde music and film.Taking a fundamentally post-psychoanalytical approach, Bodies at Risk links philosophical and aesthetic issues in two distinct periods, with postmodernism continuing and amplifying the central concerns of Romanticism, including subject formation, the disruptive effects of the human body, and the unique forms of textuality they enable through risky personal and artistic conflicts. Neveldine investigates how the body, designated as queer or otherwise, has placed itself at risk, such that it has questioned dominant notions of what it is to be a human subject in Western society, roughly since the time of the Romantics. Neveldine also explores how certain kinds of artistic conflicts have played themselves out in various texts in the Romantic period and postmodernism and what these conflicts have produced, both corporeally and textually.From Wordsworth's poem "Nutting" to Gregg Araki's film The Living End, from the Marquis de Sade's prose to the autobiographical fiction of Thomas Bernhard, the artifact radically interrogates our notions of textuality, setting aside forever its status as a mere imitation or representation, and becomes a testimony to the body's ability to resist oppression and create new types of human being.

Intersperses headline events, popular film, postmodern theory, and fictional vignettes in order to capture the elusive cultural imaginary of our twentieth-century fin de siecle.Natoli offers observations from a postmodern point of view of American culture "speeding" toward the millennium in the years 1993–1995, a time sandwiched between mounting anxieties at the beginning of the nineties and the desperate final journey of the Heaven's Gate cult in the latter half of the decade. Sometimes a whole life, like the Unabomber's, defies our logical grasp. What motivated Susan Smith, the mother who sent her two babies strapped into their car seats to the bottom of a lake? Why did we pay so much attention to the O.J. Simpson trial? Are we crawling toward our own end beyond the horizon of the New Millennium while at the same time thinking we are speeding to new positions in cyberspace? Speeding to the Millennium reviews the headlines and seeks the Big Screen to give some framing to the disturbingly contingent, to the seemingly senseless.

Considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.While agreeing that the "digitization" of the cinema is inevitable, and even a necessary adjustment to the economic realities of end-of-the-millennium cinema production, Dixon argues that it represents a fundamental representational shift in the relationship between the spectator and the image-production apparatus of the cinematograph. More than ever all visual input is merely raw material which is then subjected to digital "polishing" and "tweaking" until it attains a sheen of artificial splendor that is utterly removed from the photographic reproduction of the object and/or person originally photographed.

Considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.While agreeing that the "digitization" of the cinema is inevitable, and even a necessary adjustment to the economic realities of end-of-the-millennium cinema production, Dixon argues that it represents a fundamental representational shift in the relationship between the spectator and the image-production apparatus of the cinematograph. More than ever all visual input is merely raw material which is then subjected to digital "polishing" and "tweaking" until it attains a sheen of artificial splendor that is utterly removed from the photographic reproduction of the object and/or person originally photographed.