Postmodern American Research Articles

You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture Susan A. Glenn (bio) You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. Edited by Vincent Brook. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 337 pp. How do contemporary artists engage with the question of what it means to be a Jew? This volume contains fourteen essays by leading scholars of Jewish culture who reflect upon the complexities of Jewish identity in the work of “postmodern” representation. Each essay in this volume analyzes the tension between postmodern “anti-essentialism” and category crisis and the question of whether and how to depict Jewish difference. In the postmodern era, when artists are breaking free of reductive thinking and challenging “absolute truths,” notes the volume’s [End Page 336] editor, Vincent Brook, the most urgent issue is not “how” Jewish culture should be defined, but rather “the increasing inability, yet persistent necessity, to define it” (6). Organized topically according to cultural form, these revelatory and thought-provoking essays range across the terrain of literature, theater, music, dance, painting, photography, film, television, and stand-up comedy. Some essays, such as artist Ruth Weisberg’s “Between Exile and Irony: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Jewish Modes of Thought,” are highly polemical critiques of the postmodern erasure of Jewish ethnic particularity in representational art. For example, she lauds the work of twentieth-century “modern” artists, such as R. B. Kitaj and Marc Chagall, who took the “archetypal exilic figure” of the Wandering Jew and tried to “reclaim it,” while criticizing the representational strategies of “postmodernist appropriation that tends to drain [Jewish] meaning from the work of art rather than amplify it” (168). Weisberg identifies what she calls “a Catch-22 situation” for Jewish artists, arguing that “the art world tends to punish those who are focused on the expression of their Judaism in an unambiguous and relatively un-ironic way” (170). According to Weisberg, the large museums (where Jews are well-represented on boards of directors) rarely mount exhibits with Jewish themes, consigning these to Jewish museums, while Jewish museums tend to favor Jewish artists with a secular and ambiguous Jewish orientation. Other contributors embrace the possibilities that postmodernism offers for challenging Jewish “master narratives.” For example, in her essay “Troubling Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Theater,” Jan Lewis sees postmodernism as a useful way of challenging “reductive essentialisms,” about the nature of Jewishness. Reading the work of playwright Wendy Wasserstein through a postmodernist lens, Lewis highlights the “flexible possibilities for American Jewish identity” and shows how her plays challenge notions of a monolithic and stable sense of who and what is Jewish. Daniel Itzkovitz’s suggestive essay on the “New Jew” in Hollywood film argues that secular Jewish identity has long been “defiantly elusive” and thus may be seen as “the quintessential postmodern identity” (240). Focusing on the proliferation of male Jewish characters in recent Hollywood films, he insists Jewish liminality has also been “domesticated” and contained by efforts to turn the liminal Jew into a kind of “normative American everyman” (245). In their essay on “Postmodern Jewishness” in television comedy, Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger focus on a related theme: the notion of “newness” in the televisual depiction of Jewish men, offering the paradoxical claim that the possibilities for imagining a new sense of Jewishness emerge in the repetition of older Jewish images (279). One example is the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Although the [End Page 337] show relies on well-established traditions of Jewish humor, “the Jewish content, sensibility, and recognizability” of these familiar tropes provide fresh perspectives since they do not “fall in line with narratives and images that would be comfortable for non-Jewish audiences” (284). The “postmodern self-awareness” of the Jewish characters also allows them to assume an “outsider perspective,” even as they operate from what appears to be the realm of assimilated American life (293). Brook has assembled a stellar cast of contributors, and thus it is a shame that his all-too-brief introduction to the volume does little to highlight the thematic relationship among the essays. Rather, he focuses in on debates among “passionate adherents of the pro-, anti-, and ambivalent postmodernist schools,” but with...

Die Rezeption Salvador Dalís in der amerikanischen Kultur der Nachkriegszeit

Summary: In light of Salvador Dalí’s manifold activities during his sojourn in the United States, it seems surprising that so little scholarly attention has been devoted to the wide influence of Dalí’s oeuvre on the American culture of the post-war period. This essay ventures to investigate the stylistic and thematic impact of his imagery and his theoretical writings on the culture of Postmodernism, and more specifically, on postmodern American literature, exemplified in the works of Thomas Pynchon. After a brief overview of Dalí’s activities in the United States and of general common ground of his work with the culture and thought of Postmodernism, this article discusses his use of stylistic techniques, e.g. assemblage and eclecticism, as well as the assumed implications for Pynchon’s postmodern aesthetics. The main focus will then be put on a discussion of Dalí’s and Pynchon’s constructions of paranoia. [Keywords: Dalí, Pynchon, American Postmodernism, Surrealism, assemblage, eclecticism, intermediality, paranoia, paratext]

You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (review)

You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 337 pp. $24.95. In 1993 Samuel C. Heilman, the chair of Jewish Studies at Queen's College of the City University of New York, pointed out that are those who argue that . . . a real desire remains to a Jewish identity and continuity. . . . [I]t is not a very strong desire, however, and it adapts itself to the needs of integration in the United States. More than a decade later, it seems as if there is a real desire to maintain Jewish identity and culture, but in the plural not the singular. Jewish American artistic and cultural production has expanded so much that the National Foundation for Jewish Culture has recently proclaimed that: We are in the midst of a Jewish cultural renaissance in America . . . a Golden Age of Jewish Culture unlike any in the 4,000 year history of the Jewish people (http://www2.jewishculture.org/about/). Out of this Renaissance, Jewish identity and culture have taken on many new forms that have simply never been seen before in Jewish history. You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook, is a timely collection of essays. The essayists in this book approach several new hybrid representations of Jewish-American identity from a diversity of viewpoints. The spaces of Jewish identity they address, delimited by nine different sections in the book, include literature, theater, music, dance, painting, photography, film, stand-up comedy, and television. By and large, the essayists deal with the question of what Jewishness means in a American culture which thrives on the endless creation and recreation of new cultural identities. In addition, these essays are interested in how Jewish culture lives on in the arts and entertainment. What types of Jewish identity have been created in film, photography, dance, music, literature and theater, and what do these identities retain or reject from previous representations of Jewishness in America? These questions are prominent throughout this collection. In his introduction to this collection, Vincent Brook points out that since Jewish American identity, representation, and culture have radically changed over the last two decades, the traditional approach of Jewish Studies to Jewish culture and identity must follow. For it is the fundamental, if not obligatory, task of the postmodern age (p. 4) to challenge previous, monocausal, notions of Jewish culture and representation which include Irving Howe's late 1970s immigrant based criterion and a religious based criterion (p. 4). By challenging such criteria, through the introduction of many other forms of Jewish identity and affirming them as Jewish, an approach to Jewish identity can be augmented. To be sure, Brook and many of the essayists in this volume belong to a new group of Jewish Studies scholars whose work echoes the notion of Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, that new Jews claim their Jewishness by dissent rather than descent. Nonetheless, the issue of where Jewish identity descends from is central to the novelty of this claim. The essayists in this volume are acutely aware of this. Indeed, the creation of an anti-essentialist interpretation of Jewish culture may be a concern for most of these essays, but it is certainly not the only concern; the question of how Jewish-American identity lives on, or, as Hommi Bhabha says, translates into a plurality of Jewish identities, is also of great interest. Of these essays, there are several that stand out in their analysis of how Jewish representation creates new identities and/or maintains some form of continuity between past and the present notions of Jewish identity. By way of analyzing Jewish comic book representations, Andrea Most's essay points out that one of the crucial points of continuity between the past and present forms of Jewish identity is the representation of the Jewish body. …

Postmodern American Evangelical Liberalism? A Reflective Postscript to Volume 3 of Gary Dorrien’s Making of American Liberal Theology

Postmodern American Evangelical Liberalism? A Reflective Postscript to Volume 3 of Gary Dorrien’s <i>Making of American Liberal Theology</i>

Chinese Postmodernist Fiction

The title of this essay implies that there is a Chinese postmodernism that differs from American or European postmodernism. But the different postmodernisms also have a common basis, which can be found at the level of unstable signification. First the author briefly sketches how the concept of postmodernism traveled from the United States to western Europe and Russia, with key roles for American critics such as John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and Matei Calinescu and, in Europe, writers such as Umberto Eco and the reception of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. To the author, Chinese postmodernism differs from other variants of postmodernism because of its different cultural-historical and literary-historical background. With few exceptions, modernism was a late discovery in China. After 1978 Wang Meng, Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, and others wrote fiction in a modernist style. The simultaneity of modernism and postmodernism is a clue to the interpretation of Chinese fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernist exuberant fabulation, partly inspired by Gabriel García Márquez and partly by traditional Chinese fiction, can be found in fiction by Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Han Shaogong. Please Don't Call Me Human (Qianwan bie ba wo dang ren, 1989), by Wang Shuo, who was recently honored with a Chinese compilation of “research material concerning Wang Shuo” (Tianjin, 2005), is also discussed.

American Judaism in Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: American Judaism in Popular Culture Nathan Abrams (bio) American Judaism in Popular Culture. Edited by Leonard J. Greenspoon and Ronald A. Simkins. Studies in Jewish Civilization Vol. 17. Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2007. xvi + 286 pp. In the recent movie Wedding Daze (dir. Michael Ian Black, 2006), an Orthodox Jewish character has invented a new Jewish soft toy. Called “the Jewnicorn,” it is, as its name implies, a unicorn bedecked in Stars of David, which, when squeezed, recites a blessing in Hebrew. Although clearly inserted into the movie simply for laughs, the Jewnicorn is not as far-fetched as the filmmakers may think: Judith S. Neulander’s essay in this volume, “Tchotchkes: A Study of Popular Culture in Tangible Form,” points out that such trinkets have been existence in American Jewish popular culture since the late nineteenth century at least and have encompassed an array of comparably kitsch items. Although not the lead essay, Neulander’s contribution gives an idea of the range of this collection, collated from the proceedings of the seventeenth [End Page 120] annual symposium of the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at Creighton University. This volume, number 17 in the series, includes thirteen other essays that cover topics such as Hollywood, the Three Stooges, S. J. Perelman, theater, Bob Dylan, rock ‘n’ roll, sports, and comics by contributors including Jenna Weisman Joselit, Lawrence Baron, Steven Alan Carr, Lynn Rapaport, Thomas A. Kuhlman, Ben Furnish, Nora L. Rubel, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Steven Horowitz, and Leonard J. Greenspoon. In addition to Neulander’s piece, the other notable essays here are G. Andrew Tooze’s “David of Hollywood: Israelite King or American Superhero,” Dan W. Clanton Jr.’s “From Mr. Hankey to The Hebrew Hammer: Hanukkah in Pop Culture,” and Dereck Daschke’s “‘Oh Mama, Could This Really Be the End?’: The Apocalyptic Bob Dylan.” Tooze considers how, in what can now be considered a time-honored fashion, Hollywood remade the biblical character of David over as a cartoon hero, the prototype for Captain America, complete with cape and shield. Clanton, in contrast, analyses the appearance and use of the festival of Hanukkah in the television series South Park and Friends and the movie The Hebrew Hammer (dir. Jonathan Kesselman, 2003), respectively. If I have a minor criticism here, it is that his exploration of the popular cultural products could have been longer and more detailed in comparison to his section on the origins of Hanukkah. Finally, Daschke looks at the biblical motif running throughout Dylan’s music and in doing so shows how in appropriating the lines of the biblical prophets, Dylan, in a sense, became their modern incarnation. While it was certainly pleasurable, for this reader at least, to see that the object of study in this volume is how Judaism as religion—as opposed to the more typical focus on Jewishness as ethnicity—has influenced American popular culture, it certainly would have been interesting to consider the other side of the equation: whether and how far popular culture has influenced American Judaism, particularly those branches of Orthodoxy that present themselves as impervious to the outside world. Nevertheless, these minor criticisms aside, taken together, these essays provide a useful primer for the student seeking to discover the range of Jewish cultural production in the United States and add to the growing collection of similar studies, for example, You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook (2006). Such students may then even be able to take the next step and consider what the appearance of the Jewnicorn, or its ill-fated counterpart the “Jewla Hoop” (a Hula Hoop in the shape of a Star of David which, owing to its shape, doesn’t work), in Wedding Daze can tell us. [End Page 121] Nathan Abrams Bangor University Nathan Abrams Nathan Abrams, director of film studies at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, is author of Commentary Magazine, 1945–1959: ‘A Journal of Significant Thought and Opinion’ (2006) and editor of Jews & Sex (2008). Copyright © 2009 American Jewish Historical Society

Stuck in a Loop? Dialogue in Hypertext Fiction

Stuck in a Loop? Dialogue in Hypertext Fiction Bronwen Thomas (bio) Hypertext Fiction and Interactivity: Issues and Debates Hypertext fiction has provoked much debate since the appearance of the first examples in the late 80s. Much of this debate has been focused on questions regarding the status of these fictions, and their implications for the experience of writing and reading. Where close analysis of the form has been attempted (e.g. J. Yellowlees Douglas's readings of Joyce's afternoon, a story), it has mainly consisted of an attempt to "make sense" of the narrative, untangling the strands of the plot, and searching for some kind of closure. While this approach has offered valuable insights into the narrative structures of these fictions, and into the mechanics of the interfaces they employ, little attention has been paid to specific aspects of their style, especially the representation of speech and thought. Hypertext fiction has come a long way since the earliest examples, most notably in exploring the possibilities of creating a multimedia artifact where sounds and images accompany the written text.1 However, this paper will focus on the use of dialogue in two early hypertext fictions. Both Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story (first published 1987) and Yellowlees Douglas's I Have Said Nothing (1994) have achieved near-canonical status having been excerpted in print in the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction (Geyh). As is often the case with hypertext fictions, the writers, Jane Yellowlees Douglas and Michael Joyce, also happen to be two of the foremost theorists of the form, and the sense of mutual influence is unavoidable. The aims of this paper are twofold: to explore the functions of dialogue in these fictions and the extent to which the representations are [End Page 357] innovative; and to examine whether we need to reassess our models for understanding the functions and forms of fictional dialogue as we have begun to apply them to the print novel. For critics such as Marie-Laure Ryan, now that the hype about hypertext fiction has died down, we are left with the sobering fact that outside of university departments and a fairly small group of writers/theorists, these fictions are not widely read or talked about. Questions have been raised about the quality of the writing, and scepticism expressed about the more overblown claims made for the form. In particular, the claim that such fictions offer the reader an interactive experience has been exposed as both hollow and naively literal (e.g. Miall). But this debate has at least led to a fascinating examination of what exactly we mean by interaction, which has important implications for the study of exchanges that take place within the story world, as well as for those that take place between reader and writer, hitherto the main focus. Existing studies of dialogue-as-interaction (Leech and Short; Toolan) tend to focus on set-piece scenes, and conversational routines or rituals, but the very idea that we can isolate and fix on a "conversation" as some kind of event becomes much more problematic in hypertext fiction as the context and even the content of what is said is much more mutable. Nevertheless, when we approach dialogue in hypertext fictions, it is instructive to remember that there is a long history of experimentation with the technique in the print novel, raising important issues to do with the forms and functions of narrative and their ideological implications. Michael Joyce frequently acknowledges both in his nonfictional writing and in the intertextual references within his novels, his debt to writers such as James Joyce ("the Greater Joyce"), Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein. I shall argue that some of the techniques employed in hypertext fiction are recognizable from print novels, but this is not to say, as critics of hypertext fictions tend to do, that there is nothing new here. Rather, it is to assert that the representation of speech, too often dismissed or ignored as merely providing "colour" and "variety" in a text, is crucial to our understanding and experience of that text, whether it be in print or hypertext form, and that experimentation with the device may provoke far reaching questions about the...

Improvising over the Changes: Improvisation as Intellectual and Aesthetic Practice in the Transitional Poems of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka

In his transitional poems Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka theorizes the connections between African American identity and jazz improvisation. These poems were written and published in the 1960s during Jones/Baraka's decade-long shift away from Beat modernism to Black Arts aesthetics. During this transitional period Jones/Baraka's poetry and jazz criticism described blackness and African American musical culture as products of spontaneous and "continual alteration." Jones/Baraka transitional literary and critical writing emphasize African American identity as improvisational and performative rather than metaphysically essentialist. What is at stake in this reconsidering of Jones/Baraka's transitional moment is that we can learn how the poet merged his personal philosophical changes and political desires into literary aesthetic and intellectual theory. While this reading places Jones/Baraka within the complex picture of modern and postmodern American poetry, the essay also illustrates that this reevaluation will change our relationship to Jones/Baraka's Black Arts poetry.

Sliding to the right: the contest for the future of American Jewish orthodoxy

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Orthodoxy in America after the Holocaust 2. The Numbers 3. Jewish Education as a Field of Conflict within Orthodoxy 4. Reinventing Tradition: When Going by the Book Replaces Living on the Street 5. Machon L'Parnasa: The Educational Alternative 6. Much Truth Said in Jest: Humor, Role Distance, and Young Orthodox Jews 7. Orthodox Jewish Calls from the Walls: Posters and What They Teach Us 8. Toward a Postmodern American Orthodoxy Appendix Notes Index

Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

220 Reviews by theartificial categories of academic literarystudies, and especially by that strangely selective construct known as 'Thirties Poetry', Auden's reputation is sustained chiefly by poets and by an appreciative general public thatcan still recognize him as thegreat estEnglish-born poet ofhis century.A small band of academic scholars,most of them rounded up by Stan Smith for thisCambridge Companion, also shows an affirming flame. With the centenary ofAuden's birth almost upon us, there is still no academic 'Auden industry' on the scale of those devoted toYeats, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, although the foundations forone are being laid inEdward Mendelson's ongoing Com plete Works and in an associated series of critical editions. Stan Smith is a serialAudenist who has alreadywritten two short books on thepoet and is now atwork on a critical edition of The Orators. His editorial design in this Companion brings in rathermore contributors than isusual in the series, and within tighter word-limits, so that the strain of compression sometimes tellsupon theiressays as they race through a forty-five-yearliterary career. This plan of contents, though, has thegreatmerit of allowing the full range ofAuden's work tobe considered: notjust thepoems in almost every formand genre but theplays, the libretti, the travelbooks, thecritical essays, and themiscellaneous prose.We startwith a pithily aphoristic sur vey ofAuden's lifeand character by his biographer Richard Davenport-Hines, then move through a trioof essays on the threephases ofAuden's literarycareer-English, American, and European-before we reach a series of generic studies, including a stimulating consideration of theprose works byTony Sharpe and a valuable piece on the light verse by Stan Smith himself, which before long devours thewhole aeuvre. The second part of theCompanion is more various and thematic,with essays by Peter Porter on Auden's styles; JohnLucas on Auden's political positions and theirdebts toE. M. Forster; Rod Mengham on Auden's debts toGeorg Groddeck and Homer Lane and his distance fromFreudian orthodoxy; Richard R. Bozorth on Auden and sexuality (another of those illimitable topics); and Paola Marchetti on Auden's land scapes. Gareth Reeves's essay onAuden and religion isnotable for itscareful analysis of 'Horae Canonicae', while Rainer Emig's account of 'Auden and Ecology' is a good deal more sophisticated than one has a right to expect under such a title.The volume is rounded off in a party spiritwith Ian Sansom's 'Auden and Influence', a lively review of improbableWystan trivia. In an ideal Companion, one would look perhaps formore material on Auden's debts to such figures as T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence, but otherwise the scope of this book is highly commendable, while its merits in termsof readable prose are enhanced by its inclusion of voices from outside the academy (Davenport-Hines, Porter, Sansom). It deserves to go straight to the top of the reading list forany undergraduate or postgraduate course inwhich Auden's work appears. GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON CHRIS BALDICK IntegralMusic: Languages of African American Innovation. By ALDON LYNN NIELSEN. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2004. Xvii+2I8 pp. $26.95. ISBN 978-o-8I73-5I39-7. Undoubtedly, this is an important book. As the second book in a projected trilogy of critical accounts of experimental Black poetry inAmerica (that began with Black Chant: Languages ofAfrican American Postmodernism (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1997)), itcontinues and develops Aldon Lynn Nielsen's argument that black aesthetics play a central role in the formation ofAmerican modernity and post modernity. Indeed, the book is remarkably successful indefending itsassertion that 'black arts are at the very core of themodern' (p. I90), and itsdetailed examination MLR, 102. I, 2007 22I of thework of fiveexperimental black poets of the twentiethcentury solidly supports itsattempt tomake visible thatblackness which-it argues-modernity has covered over.Of the fivepoets discussed-Russell Atkins, Stephen Jonas,Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, and JayneCortez-only Baraka might be thought of as having any real visibility within American literaryhistory, and that (ironically, perhaps) because of his association with white poetic avant-gardes such as theBlack Mountain and New York 'schools'. But Nielsen's account of thesewriters ismore than a simple attempt tobring the four lesser-known poets into thekind...

Conductivities of Composition

AMQgI1 Review Levy continuedfrom previous page - - --------------separation of aesthetics and social ethics. Both men want to possess fully the poetry they read, to examine the relationships between black and white, ink and paper, territorial establishment and maintenance. Such relationships determine how people use their environments. Reading, seen in this light, is like lovemaking—a sensuous connection with matter is necessary to all literary understanding, regardless of how dematerialized, ruptured, or abstracted— and Atkins's verse is rife with each of these latter qualities . Nielsen observes that: forAtkins meaning serves technique, and meaning is one technique. Perhaps not since Edgar Allan Poe has American poetry seen a writer so strongly committed to the production of effect.... [This] has also served to place him well outside the dominant modes even ofthe outsiders and innovators of American postmodernity. As a black man working independently. . . [contesting] the directions of William Carlos Williams, the Objectivists, and much of the Black Mountain School, Atkins has been multiply obscured by the workings of recent literary history. Identifying the importance of Atkins's work in this way focuses upon the break in African American literary and musical culture as the bridgework of African American innovation. Nielsen defines this innovation as improvisational— a plurality of"reals" in a world moving into a polyphrenic cultural space of continuous transformation. As they say in the DJ world, it's all in the mix. Further, the idea of improvisation that Nielsen develops in his readings ofhis five subjects is incompatible with the idea of relating literary production, or that of any other art medium, to "spontaneity," a concept most readily linked to the lyric and its valuation ofself-expression predicated on the notion ofthe unitary, intending subject. Rather, the emphasis is on doing research—of"digging," as DJs put it, both on the possibilities ofan art form and on the possibilities of subjectivity. In such an evolving model, one discovers the desire for that which has not yet, and may indeed never, arrive— and which itself can be read as the basis for an idea of postmodernity: a figurative participation between writer and reader, a recollection forwards. The improvisational poetics Nielsen maps in his examination ofeach writer, from Atkins to Cortez, is constructivist, not at all spontaneist—a "fact" that all great improvisers, pre-Charlie Parker to post-Anthony Braxton, have understood. Nielsen argues brilliantly that we havepaid (and continue topay) too much in every conceivable way for having not attended to thesefive authors, and their improvisations. In his preface to Integral Music, Nielsen indicates that the order of the chapters was determined chronologically based upon theircomposition. There is another integral idea that links these chapters and each of these five authors to one another: Nielsen has theorized at least five radically innovative epistemologies, yet each of these writers uses improvisational techniques and modes of reasoning that, taken together, might well transform how we read and teach, and, in particular, how we read what we've taught our students to write. Further, Nielsen convincingly argues that the quintessential American art form is improvisational —to take a fifteen-second break and extend it into a fifteen-to-twenty minute jam. For Nielsen, improvisation is the integral modernist and postmodernist American contribution to international trends in music, poetry, and philosophy, and the works of the five authors under consideration are exemplary models of the corresponding African American legacy, the core repository of improvisational technique. Underwriting Nielsen's scholarship, as I understand him, is a modulated sense of anger at the institutional erasure of this legacy— anger at the fact that it has been inadequately appreciated, that it has gone largely unrecognized. Instead, as Julie Patton—another Clevelander postmodernist African American poet—has described the situation with regard to Atkins's oeuvre, it's much as if this work has been written in "disappearing ink," and "[blookended by volumes of a more official silence." Nielsen has, in this book, effectively given notice to that official silence. Nielsen's emphasis, brilliantly argued throughout , is that we have paid (and continue to pay) too much in every conceivable way for having not attended to these five authors, and their improvisations , with compassion, creativity, empathy, and intelligence. Integral...

Postmodern American Sociology: A Response to the Aesthetic Challenge

Postmodern American Sociology: A Response to the Aesthetic Challenge

Dance and Political Conflict: Three Comparative Case Studies

Can dance, as a non-verbal artform, effectively express political opinions? This paper examines three choreographic ways of dealing with controversial political issues, incorporating the works of artists in Germany, the US and UK. pieces have been chosen to represent three of the main trouble spots of the 20th century: World War I, the bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s, and Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Kurt Jooss’s epoch-making The Green Table, first performed in 1932, sets the tone. Based on the experiences of the First World War, it is a stark reminder of the cruelties of war and an almost uncanny foreshadow of the events of World War II. Jooss’s outspoken political stance forced him to leave Hitler's Germany for England as soon as 1933. American postmodernism is generally known for its rebellious and anti-establishment nature. conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia led to choreographies of protest in the 1960s and early 1970s. For instance, Steve Paxton, in his piece Collaboration with Wintersoldier (1971), collaborated with anti-war Vietnam veterans. Finally, the British choreographer Christopher Bruce tackled the issue of the military government in Chile. Ghost Dances (1981) uses an impressive image repertory and Latin-American folk tunes to deliver dramatic visual effects and a powerful political message. paper investigates how the three choreographers deal with the challenge of translating politics into dance; and how specific national or political ideologies feed into their works. It analyses the ways dance artists depict political conflicts and how they manage to advocate their views to influence their audience. By comparing the different approaches, one might trace the development of politically-orientated Western stage dance through the 20th Century, considering the extent to which later choreographers built on or modified earlier forms of expression.

Clichés d’architecture : la photographie d’Ed Ruscha et les sources de l’architecture postmoderne aux États-Unis

Architectural Snapshots : The Photography of Ed Ruscha and the Sources of American Postmodern Architecture. Photography, the art of light, played a key role in the 1920s in the definition of the modernist utopia of a transparent architecture. In a similar way, the photodocuments produced by the artist Ed Ruscha in the early 1960s profoundly influenced definitions of postmodern architecture in America, directly inspiring the production of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas. Ruscha’s snapshots brought attention to postwar vernacular architecture - the architecture of strips and suburbs - whose forms until then had been either condemned or simply ignored. In addition to their subject matter, the flat-footed style of Ruscha’s photographs echoed postmodern theory, whose objective was to rehabilitate the façade as the determining factor in architectural design.

Introduction: Modernism after Postmodernity

Since the waning of the debate about and the rise of glo balization as master signifier of our time, the discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard's provocative quip that any work of art has to be postmodern before it can become genuinely modern has come true in ways he could hardly have fore seen. There is much talk these days of modernity at large, second modernity, liquid modernity, alternative modernity, countermodernity, and whatnot. Modernity and its complex and conflicted relationship to modernism are being reassessed in architecture and urban studies as they are in literature, the visual arts, music, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. In a certain way, this is not so surprising. This journal has always argued against a sim plistic linear chronology of the modern and the postmodern. Rather than oppose postmodernism to modernism in a reductive binary or as separate stages on a progressive time line, we saw North American postmodernism as an attempt to rewrite and to renegotiate key aspects of the early-twentieth century European avant-gardes in an American context in which the rela tions between high and low culture, as well as the role of art in society, were coded quite differently than they were in Europe, either in the interwar or in

Don DeLillo's &lt;i&gt;Cosmopolis&lt;/i&gt; and the Dialectics of Complexity and Simplicity in Postmodern American Philosophy and Culture

Don DeLillo's &lt;i&gt;Cosmopolis&lt;/i&gt; and the Dialectics of Complexity and Simplicity in Postmodern American Philosophy and Culture

Postfeminism from A to G

Postfeminism from A to G Chris Holmlund (bio) Does postfeminism indicate (a) an attitude, (b) an optic, or (c) an object? In search of answers, I perused databases, surfed Web sites, pursued bibliographic leads, and queried friends, young and old. It seems the answer is (d) all of the above. I was surprised to see that while several books use the word (with Tania Modleski's 1991 Feminism without Women seminal), databases focused on media journals yield little on the topic. In hopes that my peregrinations will be of use to Cinema Journal readers, I shall provide an overview of how "postfeminism" and "postfeminist" have been used and by whom. I will then offer my "take" on which recent films may be labeled postfeminist. Finally, I will sketch where earlier postfeminist analyses will require updating and why, if they are to "fit" postmillennial media artifacts. As a noun, "postfeminism" has had at least three distinctly feminine faces. For me, these range from A to G: "academic," "chick," and "grrrl."1 Since 1982, when the term first popped up in a New York Times magazinearticle featuring "Voices from the Postfeminist Generation," the most prevalent variant has been "C," or "chick," postfeminism. Periodically promoted in magazines, debated on talk shows, and paraded in newspapers, "chick" postfeminism entails a backlash against or a dismissal of the desirability for equality between women and men, in the workforce and in the family. "Chick" postfeminists are generally young; a few are middle-aged; none seem old (Botox helps). Many are hostile to the goals and gains of second-wave feminism; others simply take these gains and goals for granted. Some like to party, dress up, and step out, taking breaks from work to date or shop; others stay home, tending hearth, hubby, and kids. A second, "wilder," bunch of postfeminists knows both popular and academic haunts. Primarily American, these riot grrrls ("G" postfeminists, aka third-wave feminists) are politically engaged yet playful. They are happy to acknowledge the diversity among women that "chick" postfeminism ignores, and they are eager to carry on first- and second-wave feminist struggles. A third, smaller group of "A" (for "academic") postfeminists is steeped in French, British, and American postmodern, postcolonial, poststructural, queer, (etc.), theory. All three variants would seem tied to contemporary times, yet many commentators note that postfeminism is not new and that feminism is not "done" (e.g., [End Page 116] postfeminism also emerged in the 1920s, after women won the vote). But if postfeminism can be said to have a long(ish) history, the adjective "postfeminist" has been applied to texts—from books and songs to TV programs and films to paintings, cartoons, and photographs—only since the 1980s. Madonna long reigned as postfeminist queen, thanks to her sexually charged performances and mutating persona, rehearsed through songs, stage shows, screen appearances, books, interviews, photographs, and more. To date, postfeminist discourse in film studies has concentrated on big-budget late-1980s to early-1990s titles like Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1987), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), Baby Boom (Charles Shyer, 1987), Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1991), and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992).2 Most commentators envision postfeminism as a white "chick" backlash that denies class, avoids race, ignores (older) age, and "straight"-jackets sexuality. A few celebrate the poise, panache, and performance of the "girly woman" or relish the coolly cutthroat competence of the "glam" exec. A very few believe that boy characters or male critics can also be postfeminists.3 But can late-1990s and early-2000 films also be termed postfeminist? If so, which ones? And what is at stake? Simply the refashioning of previously "feminist" topics (rape, battery, abortion rights, birth control, equal pay, child care, healthcare) or the redesigning of previously "feminist" figures (outspoken teens, working girls, embattled moms, poised professionals, gentle men) along (post)millennial lines? To explore whether and how postfeminist discourse may be applied to contemporary films, let us examine two recent movies featuring Latinas: Out of Sight (1998) and Real Women Have Curves (2002). Admittedly, each reached a different audience. Out of Sight is a star-studded (Jennifer Lopez, George...

Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Conte, Joseph. 2002. Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. $59.95 hc. $24.95 sc. 312 pp.Academics interested in postmodern theory will enjoy Joseph Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. Its theoretical conjectures-if problematic-are nevertheless bold and interesting, and Conte's application of theory to individual works yields remarkable interpretations. Taking his lead from works like N. Katherine Hayles's Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990), Conte further develops and applies chaos theory to postmodern literature, explicating it in context of United States. Here, he examines numerous authors, prominent among them John Hawkes, Kathy Acker, Don Delillo, and Thomas Pynchon.His theory of postmodern literature, like Fredric Jameson's, envisions a permanent and irreparable breach between modernist and postmodernist works. Using Thomas Kuhn's proposal that scientific progress proceeds via radical paradigm shifts, Conte asserts modernist science and literature have been superceded by new paradigm of postmodern science and literature. Citing authors ranging from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Conte reads modernism and traditional science as part of outmoded paradigm which obsessively seeks to reality because of a latent fear of and unpredictability. This results in a modernist political aesthetic whose concern for centering control approaches fascism (2002, 11).However, artist or scientist working in emerging postmodern paradigm does not fear such instability and uncertainty. Following Jean Francois Lyotard, postmodern artist has incredulity toward metanarratives and expresses affinity for-rather than aversion to-forms of disorder (Lyotard qtd. in Conte 2002, 6, 8). Thus, postmodernist also dispenses with modernism's binary distinction and hierarchy of order/disorder, replacing it with attitude resembling two primary branches of chaos theory, which investigate order as possible emanation of disorder, and chaos as one possible result of overly stringent order-the process by which one becomes other (9). One sees and disorder's intertwining relationship through each novel's world building-a task indicative of order-and the inventive form of novel, most prominent feature of which is nonlinear narrative-a form suggesting (2).I particularly liked Conte's reading of John Hawkes's Travesty, wherein he emphasizes emerging from disorder. In imagination of a suicidal driver-narrator, we see a beautiful, well-engineered sports car obliterated in an 'accident . . . perfectly contrived by narrator himself. This, of course, is paradoxical, since it challenges binary opposition between deterministic and stochastic, event that has a causal relation to its antecedent and one that is purely result of random processes (2002, 38). While driver has planned accident, it is also possible that unintended accident may occur while driver speeds to his intended destination, side of old farmhouse. Thus, we have order, but unavoidable possibility of chaos. Though story's entirety takes place in car as it zips to intended destination, Conte submits that linearity remains suspended as the narration refutes any claim to suspense as a means of galvanizing reader's attention (34). …

Postmodern American sociology: a response to the aesthetic challenge

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 The Modern as the Scientization and Moralization of Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics/Politics Chapter 3 The Postmodern as the Aestheticization of Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics/Politics Chapter 4 Vulnerability of Sociology to the Aesthetic Challenge Chapter 5 The Emergence of Postmodern American Sociology as a Response to the Aesthetic Challenge Chapter 6 Conclusion: Further Implications of Postmodern American Sociology Chapter 7 Bibliography Chapter 8 Index

The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (review)

The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (review)