Postmodern Techniques Research Articles

Metadrama in Old Time Radio: “Abbott…What Page Are You On?”

Introduction In Radio Voices, Michele Hilmes identifies the of radio theater as social and cultural force that dominated waking hours and public consciousness from 1922 until its apotheosis in television in the early 1950s (xiv, xv). During these years of economic crisis and war, radio's primary cultural role was to entertain, provide hope, and reconfirm America's traditional values. Radio also played the secondary role of introducing a postmodern sensibility to mainstream America, a role that has gone unstudied while numerous scholarly works have discussed the postmodern in stage productions of the time - Brecht, Pirandello, Beckett, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shakespeare revivals, and even Gilbert and Sullivan. However, several popular radio programs made their own fictionality a major part of the storytelling, employing postmodern techniques like metadrama, plurality of style, intertextuality, role-switching, a play within the play, and the celebration of chance and playfulness. Radio during its golden age influenced nearly every household, reaching as many as 82% of Americans in 1947, according to a C. E. Hooper survey, precursor to television's Nielsen ratings (Rodriguez). Radio achieved great popular appeal, in part, because its fictional characters entered the listener's world and became part of the family. Unlike stage productions and films, which required people to leave their homes and experience the performance in an unfamiliar place with a group of strangers, radio plays were performed right in the authences' living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Radio was integrated into ordinary daily life: housewives listened to The Life of Mary Southern and The Romance of Helen Trent as they did housework; children listened to Little Orphan Annie and The Lone Ranger as they did their homework; white collar and blue collar alike listened to Jack Benny and The Lux Radio Theater as they read the evening newspaper or drifted off to sleep. A prime example of the intimacy radio created was FDR's Fireside Chats, a series of thirty radio addresses between 1933 and 1944 that comforted and informed the public. The president's conversational manner and the nature of radio broadcasting gave listeners the impression that he was speaking directly to each of them, a characteristic honored by poet Carl Lamson Carmer two days after Roosevelt's death: [...] I never saw him - But I knew him. Can you have forgotten How, with his voice, he came into our house, The President of the United States, Calling us friends. (Johnson i95) Listeners similarly befriended radio's fictional characters. Through the combination of the writers' creativity, the actors' voices, and each listener's imagination the scripts sprang to life, making the characters, those disembodied but engaging voices, the listener's friends. Radio of that era thrived on postmodern playfulness, often blurring the boundary between the listener's world and the characters' world through the acknowledgement of being engaged in makebelieve, dialogues that entangled characters and listeners in a maze of language, self-conscious play with sounds, and celebration of nonsense. Radio comedies, in particular, followed Brecht's notion of sporting which, according to Margaret Eddershaw, acknowledges the authence as a participant, an educated participant, in the event. More than that, the spectator's presence is carefully exploited in that the actors in a Brecht performance frequently address the authence directly: and so they become implicated. In naturalistic theater, of course, the actor pretends the authence is not there, and spectators become privileged voyeurs who peep through the 'fourth wall' at the selfsustaining 'life' on stage. (22; her emphasis) Unlike naturalistic theater and film (and later television), which encouraged the authence to lose itself in the narrative, radio theater demanded active participation in story-making: listeners had to use their imaginations to help construct, maintain, and inhabit each radio program's fictional world. …

On a Twenty-First-Century Quest for Authoritative Narration: The Drama of Voice in Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm

This article discusses Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm (2008) in the context of the early twenty-first-century return to “big novels” and authoritative forms of narration that has been diagnosed by critics as well as scholars. While situating Tellkamp's poetics as part of this trend, I argue that he is only partially successful in redeveloping such forms in Der Turm. Through a detailed narratological analysis, I demonstrate how the novel remains fundamentally shaped by precisely the modernist and postmodernist techniques of challenging authoritative narrative that it tries to move beyond in its attempt to authoritatively narrate the end of the GDR. With its aesthetics of narrative performance—or, more specifically, narrative presence—Der Turm struggles to move beyond the political legacy it denounces.

<b>Telling the truth: Don DeLillo in an age of amnesia and redress</b><br>DOI:10.5007/2175-8026.2010n59p176

The December 2006 Iran Holocaust denial Conference and the international excoriation of it reveal a paradox of two cultural strands that are emblematic of the legacy of the twentieth century: official denial and historical amnesia on the one hand; and (inter)national attempts at truth telling and historical redress on the other. Massive violence–and associative denial—punctuate the entire twentieth century. Yet coordinated tenacious efforts at public acknowledgment of “what really happened”–a recurrent and insistent emphasis in this context of trials, reparations, and above all, truth commissions—and concomitant historical redress for state-sanctioned crimes is a particularly recent phenomenon, unique, in fact, to the 1990s. But it is not only political readers who address what Priscilla B. Hayner, in her exhaustive study of truth commissions calls, “unspeakable truths.” This essay addresses the incongruity between the recent global concern with truth telling, official apology, memory and historical redress on the one hand–an obsession that certainly includes the US—and American amnesia on the other. It is in the interstices of these two apposite late twentieth century phenomena–amnesia and truth telling; “history” distinct from “the truth of the past”; “official” opposed to “vernacular” memory — that, I argue, a new genre of historical novel develops and performs a vital cultural work: telling the truth in an age of amnesia and redress. Such novels engage the recalcitrant materials of historical experience to assert truth claims that in turn challenge nationalist histories and revise traditional mythologies. Among the foremost authors of this new “truth-telling” historical novel is Don DeLillo. Americana, the vital precursor to Libra and especially to Underworld, is the definitive harbinger of DeLillo’s third century of work that writes both within and against postmodernism. In these Cold-War era novels, DeLillo ultimately moves beyond the ironized perspective of history that is the distinguishing feature of “historiographic metafiction”; his postmodern narrative techniques (from irony to looping novelistic structures and dense intertextuality) inscribe a critical distance from history only to force a raw encounter with it. As such, DeLillo exploits the tension between innocence and violence–the literally malignant legacy of the Cold War–to reveal the way in which official culture is amnesiac by definition.

Slipstreams, Paraspheres, Interstices: Fictions of the New Millennium

The fracturing of sf into ever more specialized categories, as Pawel Frelik notes elsewhere in this issue, follows the parallel rise of postmodern literary techniques and their transfusion—first by New Wave writers and then by cyberpunks and so-called slipstreamers—into the arteries of sf, with each subsequent manifesto an attempt to revivify a body of generic conventions labeled artistically moribund. The resulting avant-garde hybrids have sent critics scrambling to contain and taxonomize the trend in order to legitimate the contours of a developing aesthetic as well as identify points of meaningful divergence. This situation has given rise to a colorful array of identifying terms—slipstream, Avant-Pop, New Wave Fabulism, New Weird, and so on—often coined (or capitalized upon) by publishers eager to cash in by successfully branding the Next Big Thing. In some ways this publishing landscape is the polar opposite of the “Iron Curtain of category marketing” lamented by Bruce Sterling in his “Slipstream” jeremiad, as the marketplace now accommodates a greater range of “in-between” content than ever before. Niche communities, championed by Mark Amerika in his “Avant-Pop Manifesto” as the net-based collectives who would destabilize the

Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz: Alienation Techniques and the Use of Mediated Material on the Live Stage

Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz Alienation Techniques and the Use of Mediated Material on the Live Stage Steve Earnest Throughout the latter years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, the use of film, video, and mediated settings became an increasingly important aspect of scenography at Germany’s largest state theatres. Key developments in stage technology— such as the use of high-powered projectors, the use of glass slides instead of those made of plastic or acetate, and the increasing use of digital video technologies—permitted greater experimentation with live and mediated action and comprised a permanent part of the German theatre landscape . Given the immense technical capabilities of the German state theatres in addition to their high levels of national funding, multimedia advances have been arguably more profound in Germany than in any place in the world. Perhaps no stage director was more influential in this arena than Frank Castorf, noted Intendant of Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz. From the mid-1980s until the first decade of the twenty-first century Castorf integrated the arts of theatre and cinema in a manner that both heightened the art of stage direction in Germany as well as modified and advanced numerous theatrical concepts, such as the Brechtian concept of verfremdungseffekt, or alienation. Other ideas associated with Brechtian epic theatre, such as montage and the use of music, as well as more radical techniques of deconstruction and postmodern structure as advanced by Heiner Müller, were also employed by Castorf. Unique in his combination of the dual aesthetic of theatre and film, Castorf’s use of cameras on the live stage has challenged theatre aesthetics by contrasting the live stage figure with the full or partial human face in close-up, by utilizing multiple cameras on different 42 S T E v E E A R N E S T areas of the theatrical space and by incorporating the act of filming and camera work into the action of his works. Three of Castorf’s productions , Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Erniedrigte Und Beleidigte (The Insulted and the Injured), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Bertolt Brecht’s Der Jasager/Der Neinsager (He Who Says Yes/He Who Says No),1 serve to illustrate Castorf’s varied directorial approaches and his unique film/theatre aesthetic. Founded in 1914, the Volksbühne has historically been a regular site for live productions that experimented with multimedia and film. The early period of the Volksbühne included multimedia work by Erwin Piscator and the young Brecht; its middle period as a state theatre of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) featured radical experimentation involving Soviet-influenced film and video techniques under the leadership of Benno Besson. Throughout the later years of the GDR and into the post-reunification period, Castorf emerged into the Berlin scene as an enfant terrible, a radical young director who mounted numerous shockingly provocative productions that challenged GDR politics while pushing artistic mores to their breaking point and that subsequently advanced postmodern techniques such as collage structure and deconstruction. An important element of Castorf’s dramaturgy and theatre aesthetic at the Volksbühne was the commingling of live and mediated material as well as the inclusion of rock music (the Rolling Stones and other iconic rock groups have always been prevalent in his work) and numerous references to popular culture. Having served as Intendant since 1992, Castorf steadily developed a reputation as one of the most provocative, innovative , yet notorious directors on the German stage. As a student of Theaterwissenschaft (or Theatre Science) at Humbolt Universität in Berlin in the 1970s, Castorf had studied the theories of Brecht but favored the more radical structure of Müller in practice. Because the strict stance regarding socialist realism had become more relaxed in the GDR in the 1970s, Müller’s synthetic fragments and collage works (such as Hamletmaschine, published in 1971) had become extremely influential among academics. After staging a number of television projects for the East German Television system (DEFA) Castorf began to incorporate ideas of collage structure, including video and other mediated material , into his directorial vision. Alternatively praised...

The Value of Life Design Counselling for an Adolescent who Stutters

This study reports the results of a life design approach case study with an adolescent with stuttering. A variety of postmodern techniques were used to engage the adolescent in life design conversations about a preferred and meaningful future. Post-intervention, the individual seemed more capable of making a career choice with a sense of empowerment or personal agency. Life design counselling enabled the individual to engage in meaningful career exploration.

José Cardoso Pires's Balada da Praia dos Cães, Historiographic Metafiction, and the Detective Novel

This article examines the ways in which José Cardoso Pires's novel A Balada da Praia dos Cães uses the postmodern techniques of what Linda Hutcheon calls 'historiographic metafiction' in order to revisit and review the social conditions prevalent at the height of the Salazar dictatorship. For Hutcheon, the principal characteristic of historiographic metafiction is the way in which it both installs and subverts official history. In Balada it is the real-life murder of an opponent of the regime that is fictionalized or, in the words of Brian McHale, turned into 'apocryphal history' in order better to investigate what Cardoso Pires calls the 'social crime' of the Estado Novo. It is argued here that one of the main ways in which Cardoso Pires challenges the historical is through a parodic reworking of the generic conventions of the detective novel. As well as permitting a multiple view of the socio-political situation of the country and a flâneur's-eye view of the city of Lisbon in the early 1960s, Cardoso Pires's parodying of familiar genre figures such as the detective, the suspects, the perpetrators, and the victim allows the author to depict a country and a time in which there was nothing just about justice.

In search of African literary aesthetics: Production and reception of the texts of Amos Tutuola and Yvonne Vera

English language texts of Africa and its Diaspora that are ‘transgressive’ in the sense that they deviate from realist, linear narratives, may be linked under the categories of modern, post-modern, or post-colonial literatures. Post-colonial critics generally consider such writing to respond to colonization and Western literatures, which the texts subvert by ‘writing back’. This article suggests that artistic principles present in indigenous African oral arts including music and in particular drumming, as well as oral storytelling, provided a resource-base for the aesthetics of Nigerian Amos Tutuola's and Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera's texts, the first of which were published in 1952 and 1992, respectively. These aesthetics include fusion between the physical and metaphysical worlds, a preponderance of images, use of repetition and sound and rhythm of words, non-linear narrative, and non-closure. The article examines the conditions that gave rise to the production of Tutuola's texts and their reception particularly among European publishers and critics. It explores the resource-base for the aesthetics of Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and argues for the presence of aesthetics based in oral arts and cross-cultural exchange within the Yoruba culture. As the article demonstrates through discussion of the production and critical reception of his texts, Tutuola wrote texts that were considered innovative within the European and American contexts, without appropriating modern and postmodern techniques. The article similarly explores the production and critical reception of Vera's texts. Through examining the resource-base for Vera's texts and discussing their critical reception, it suggests that Vera and therefore other writers of texts that lie outside of realist, linear narratives – even if educated in European, American, and other world literatures – may draw on aesthetic resources based in oral arts indigenous to Africa.

Not Fade Away: Adapting History and Trauma in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance and Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies

In his 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai deploys postmodernist techniques to relate the tale of a small Hungarian town that falls briefly under the spell of a mysterious circus performer known as The Prince, only to have that spell broken in brutal fashion by a newly reconstituted town government. While many have interpreted the novel simply as a fable addressing humankind’s frailties and susceptibility to manipulation, I propose to read the text in a new way: as an allusive and slyly allegorical attempt to contend with the twin specters haunting modern Hungarian history, those being complicity with Nazi Germany during World War II and the subsequent capitulation to/collaboration with the Soviet Union. Through suggestive and symbolically freighted language, Krasznahorkai is able to reflect on these “unrepresentable” traumas and begin the process of healing Hungary's psychic scars. Filmmaker Bela Tarr, in his 2000 cinematic adaptation of the novel entitled Werckmeister Harmonies, continues the process begun by Krasznahorkai, concentrating in particular on the role played by Hungary in the Holocaust. Infusing Krasznahorkai's story with the kind of visceral and affective impact only film can provide, Tarr takes another step toward the “mourning work” necessary for Hungary to overcome its past and move into the future free from history's debilitating effects.

The Impact of Life Design Counselling on Adolescents

This study records a process of heightening self-awareness within a semi-structured ‘life design counselling’ process. The research was conducted on the basis of a case study designed to facilitate co-constructive conversation with a purposefully selected youth. The participant was enabled to reconstruct a preferred and meaningful future that could change as different experiences, challenges and needs arose. The study suggested that the postmodern techniques that were implemented enhanced the involvement of the participant in the study. The participant revealed heightened self-insight into his personal experiences, a ‘changed’ attitude to certain aspects of his life context and pro-active behaviour with regard to the challenges he was facing. We (the researchers) concluded that life design counselling could be a promising strategy that could have a lasting effect on adolescents.

Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition

In the last decades one of the more propulsive artistic phenomena in the world were (and often still are) the visual arts created in the socialist countries, these ranging from the Soviet Union (especially between the early seventies and the late eighties), Central and East European countries (in the eighties), Cuba (in the eighties), and P. R. China (from 1989 and still continuing). In the paper it shall be argued that this type of politicized late socialist art emerges in these countries in the period of their transition from the socialist into the postsocialist society and culture-to disappear or be essentially transformed with the demise of the political and social conditions wherein art and culture had the potential to be a pivotal means for expressing critical positions. Such art was only rarely causally related. It emerged from similar historical conditions of possibility and represented a distinct and specific instance of postmodernism. It should thus be regarded as a specific cultural phenomenon with the following properties being its main distinguishing characteristics: conceptualism; use of postmodern techniques and procedures; profuse use of socialist and communist imagery; use of national heritage and of folk, traditional, and mass culture; frequent use of what the author designates as the ”binary” artistic approach. It is especially this last feature which sharply distinguishes this type of art from its dissident predecessors.

Pisliachornobyl's'ka biblioteka: ukrains'kyi literaturnyi postmodern by Tamara Hundorova (review)

REVIEWS I47 Hundorova, Tamara. Pisliachornobyl's 'ka biblioteka:ukrains'kyiliteraturnyi postmo dern.Krytyka, Kyiv, 2005. 263 pp. Notes. Index. English Summary. 19UAH (paperback). In Pisliachornobyl's'ka biblioteka (The Post-Chornobyl Library) Tamara Hun dorova translates the idea that the nuclear age is linkedwith the postmodern condition toUkraine: theChornobyl disaster, in the author's view, dramati cally transformed theUkrainian consciousness, entering it as a discourse in the same way that the nuclear threat of the Cold War entered Western consciousness. Chornobyl brought with itmistrust not only of totalitarian authority, but also of all authoritative discourse. The disaster also led to a rethinking of time and space, since itseffectsknew no boundaries and threat ened to end time and plunge theworld intopost-apocalyptic regression.With the disintegration of structures and hierarchies that it brought, Chornobyl consequently caused a decentralization and fragmentation of Ukrainian literature. Ukrainian intellectual and literary life became highly diversified, though with one uniting factor: the post-Chornobyl discourse. The texts produced within this discourse constitute the 'post-Chornobyl library' of the book's title. After laying out this theoretical approach, Hundorova discusses the devel opment of postmodernism inUkraine, highlighting numerous complications such as the interference of nationalist-romantic discourse in the embryonic postmodern process, or the re-activation of Ukrainian modernism: Ukrainian postmodernism paradoxically becomes a 'reflection and a completion' of this interruptedmodernism, rather than standing in opposition to it (p. 39). Other issues discussed by Hundorova include the process of re-evaluation of the Ukrainian literary canon, transformations in linguistic behaviour and how postmodernism fits into a 'culturally organic' vision of Ukrainian literature (p. 57). The book then goes on to discuss individual or groups of writers. The author sees theKyiv ironists,with their ironic linguistic behaviour, and the Bu-Ba-Bu poets, with their subversive carnival ethos, as forerunners and initiators of Ukrainian postmodernism. She identifies a common 'morpho logical' approach to reality between Taras Prokhasko and Iurii Izdryk, comparing the 'novel-essays' of the former, with their 'thought image con structions',with the latter's distorted dream imagery, inwhich the boundaries between subject and object become blurred (pp. 97-115). She also examines the advent of Ukrainian feminist postmodernism in the shape of Oksana Zabuzhko, who combines sexuality, language and national-cultural identity in a hybrid form ofwriting somewhere between popular women's fictionand the intellectual essay. In Serhii Zhadan's work Hundorova sees deliberate contrasting of 1960sWestern ideals with the nationalistic modernism popular inUkraine at the same time, combined with a deconstructive approach to socialist symbols that she identifieswith thework of theMoscow conceptual ists.The Chornobyl disaster itself ismost directly linked with the work of Ievhen Pashkovskyi, and his apocalyptic, moralizing texts.The author also identifieswhat she calls 'post-totalitarian kaif (post-totalitarian kicks) in the 148 SEER, 86, I, 2008 work of Volodymyr Tsybulko (p. 159), who combines mass-culture kitsch with a constructive underlying cultural agenda. In the final chapter she examines ?migr? dramatist George Tarnawsky's original stance on Derridian deconstruction in his 'anthology of anti-feminist concepts' (p. 227). Iurii Andrukhovych is themost analysed author in the book (which leads at times to repetition), and is discussed in the context of 'carnival postmodernism' (p. 77), post-colonialism and in the chapter 'Post-modern topography: nostalgia and revenge' (pp. 125-37). What is demonstrated by the book is somewhat at odds with what might seem to be its initial premise. The varied nature of the examined texts, and the literaryapproaches and cultural philosophies behind them, suggest a literary postmodernism that at once embraces and rejects the name. Few of thewriters discussed can be said to be purely postmodernist: the Bu-Ba-Bu was an embryonic form of postmodernism, not recognized as such at the time and remarkable more for its socio-political role; theKyiv ironistswere also only retrospectively associated with postmodernism; the 'post-totalitarian kaif ofTsybulko, the apocalyptic visions of Pashkovskyi and the intellectual ideals of Tarnawsky, while all involving postmodernist techniques, have more in common with what Hundorova herself describes as a 'neo-modernist' view of literature (p. 254); similarly, the two most important writers discussed, Andrukhovych and Zabuzhko, have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with postmodernism which, in its Western form...

Chiropractic Research in the Postmodern World: A Discussion of the Need to Use a Greater Variety of Research Methods

This paper aims to provide a discussion of postmodern research ideas that could be implemented in the chiropractic profession. Many studies on chiropractic care are really more evaluations of one or two modalities alone (such as spinal manipulative therapy / chiropractic adjustments) and do not consider the entire chiropractic clinical encounter. The results of chiropractic care in randomized controlled trials for example have not necessarily shown the results that one might anticipate and the evidence is conflicting. Postmodern research encourages looking at problems from multiple perspectives and requires consideration of local context first and foremost. Qualitative and practice-based / action research methods are postmodern techniques that have been employed sparingly in chiropractic research. These methods could be of benefit as they could reduce the gap between practice and research and provide a more patient-centered means of studying the profession. Several chiropractic researchers have indicated the need to use such techniques to improve the profession and our understanding of it. Implementing research methods that have postmodern perspective could be beneficial for the profession. This is not to say that randomized controlled trials should be abandoned, they are still an extremely necessary part of the health care research landscape, but tempering them with some studies that employ unique postmodern methodologies could be useful in helping expand our understanding of the profession, particularly at a local and clinical level.

Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don't: On the Pragmatics of a Postmodern Psychoanalytic Stance

Bringing the Plague highlights the relation between postmodern theory and technique. I explore Layton's application of postmodernism's concern with the analyst's subjectivity and subject relation position in her discussion of a male analyst's treatment of a female patient. Arguing for a pragmatic therapeutic approach, I dispute the efficacy of being excessively transparent in certain instances. After outlining implicit tenets of relational and postmodern theories, I highlight the importance of ensuring that theoretical belief systems do not blunt our sensitivity to patients' therapeutic needs.

Past and Present in Victor Hugo Rascon Banda's La Malinche and Marisol Martin del Campo's Amor y conquista

Mexican writers have repeatedly used the life of La Malinche as a vehicle for their reflections on the question of Mexican national identity. This has resulted in a tradition of ahistorical and unduly theological readings of Mexican history which presents La Malinche either as traitor to or symbolical mother of a nation that did not in fact come into being until several centuries after his death. With the help of Michael André Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson's work on closed and open narratives, this article reads two recent works on La Malinche, in order to determine to what extent they reiterate traditional views of La Malinche's role in Mexican history. V'ctor Hugo Rascón Banda's play La Malinche deploys postmodernist techniques of anachronism and pastiche, but nevertheless reinserts La Malinche into the standard master narrative of the Mexican nation. Marisol Martín del Campo's novel Amor y conquista mixes painstaking historical reconstruction with the overt fictionalizing of the past, and succeeds in capturing a sense of uncertainty and openness of the story of La Malinche's life.

"My Holocaust Is Not Your Holocaust": "Facing" Black and Jewish Experience in The Pawnbroker, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood

What is to be gained by drawing literary comparisons between the African Diaspora experience of slavery and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust? Can such comparisons be made without distorting the historical record? This article critiques the juxtaposition of tragedy found in The Pawnbroker—both the novel and the film version—and offers a reading of Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl as a polemical response to The Pawnbroker. Two Holocaust-related novels by the West Indian writer Caryl Phillips are then examined as models of how a literary text can enact a “facing” of black and Jewish experience through the postmodern technique of narrative fragmentation and juxtaposition.

“My Holocaust Is Not Your Holocaust”: “Facing” Black and Jewish Experience in The Pawnbroker, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood

Abstract What is to be gained by drawing literary comparisons between the African Diaspora experience of slavery and the Jewish experience of the Holocaust? Can such comparisons be made without distorting the historical record? This article critiques the juxtaposition of tragedy found in The Pawnbroker—both the novel and the film version—and offers a reading of Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl as a polemical response to The Pawnbroker. Two Holocaust-related novels by the West Indian writer Caryl Phillips are then examined as models of how a literary text can enact a “facing” of black and Jewish experience through the postmodern technique of narrative fragmentation and juxtaposition.

Lessons on “Otherness”: What Therapists Can Learn from Traveling

Abstract Reflecting on my travel with children through the Middle East just prior to September 11, 2001, I discuss the usefulness of travel as a metaphor in the work of family therapists. Travel that immerses one in a culture different than one's own provides an opportunity for reflection on one's own cultural baggage and a concrete experience of how different perceptions of reality influence aspects of the work family therapists do. In this paper I discuss the travel experience as it relates to both postmodern therapeutic techniques and crosscultural sensitivity during treatment. As a metaphor for the clinical relationship, travel accomplishes two goals related to the therapist's use-of-self: first, it challenges us to develop our skills at hearing others' world views; second, travel can make us aware of the artificial break between the highly individualizing aspects of our clinical practice and the need to understand our practice as embedded in broader social and political processes.

The Representation of the Shoah in Maus: History as Psychology

The contemporary tendency in United States culture to substitute a discourse of psychology for political and social analysis is especially evident in treatments of the Shoah. Drawing on postmodernist techniques, Art Spiegelman's“Holocaust commix”, Maus, dramatizes not historical reality but the effort of representing the memory of trauma. In the absence of symbolic authority, suffering from rivalry with his father and haunted by the real of the father's voice, the son becomes the subject of the narration. Like Maus, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and the criticism of Dominick LaCapra focus on the psychological processes of the private individual.

The Postmodern Ballpark as a Leisure Setting: Enchantment and Simulated De-McDonaldization

As ballparks have grown in size to accommodate ever larger crowds, they have become increasingly rationalized or McDonaldized. However, rationalization brings with it disenchantment, that is, when they are rationalized, stadiums and other sites of consumption can lose the magical qualities that attract consumers. Recently, in an effort to attract larger crowds, ballparks have undergone a process of reenchantment whereby the magical allure of the ballpark is simulated to increase the consumer appeal of a rationalized setting. This article explores the applicability to contemporary ballparks of the various mechanisms involved in reenchantment, including such postmodern techniques as extravaganzas, simulations, implosions, and manipulations of time and space. We show that the evolution of the ballpark not only supports the reenchantment thesis, but also underscores the increasing commercialization of leisure. We also argue that the apparent de-McDonaldization that accompanies reenchantment is largely superficial and artificial; it is simulated de-McDonaldization, which remains rational at the core.