Postmodern Trends Research Articles

The Post-Modern Student

The differences between present-day post-modern students and educators from older generations require changes in educational approach, but also challenge post-modern trends. Students' postmodern experiences may lead them to seek individuality among diverse sources of identity, seeing knowledge as a throwaway consumption good, and education promotes flexibility and “edutainment.” However, professional education trains people for structured managerialist organisations and the accumulation of shared professional knowledge. Social work education needs to be reframed as a process of emergence in which educators and students work jointly to create knowledge and identity in their professional area. To operate in an increasingly complex and changing society, students need to create a strong professional identity and learn how to transfer knowledge and values from one situation to another. In this way, social work education connects with the Danish managerial concept of “chaos pilots” in which students are prepared to deal with cultural and social change.

How Nursing Ethics as a Subject Changes: An analysis of the first 11 years of publication of the journal Nursing Ethics

By analysing the first, second, 10th and 11th years of publication (i.e. volumes 1, 2, 10, 11) of Nursing Ethics, I will show the significant visible trends in the articles and draw some conclusions. The trends are visible at various levels: from simple analysis of an issue, or a comment on a situation in the early years, to in-depth philosophical and research studies; and from short statements to much longer articles. The ethical approaches used go from either none or unquestioned assumptions to several approaches used in any one study. This corresponds to the general postmodern trend in society. The interpretation made of these trends is of a kind of protest at nurses and nursing being devalued. Although this is expressed negatively, the positive message conveyed is that nurses are now taking their professional life into their own hands, vigorously and more daringly than a decade ago.

From Science to Multiculturalism: Postmodern Trends in Environmental Organizations

Postmodern social theory has had little impact on studies of global environmental activism and politics, and has often been treated with suspicion. Yet, in this article, I argue that social science theories of both postmodernization and cultural modernization can provide insights into how globalizing processes have affected environmental politics. Where current perspectives on globalization and environmental politics tend to focus on globalization's homogenizing effects, postmodernization arguments suggest that globalization and postmodern social trends have given rise to hybrid, multicultural politics. In the environmental realm, these trends have challenged environmentalists whose claims are based on science and encouraged hybrid forms of environmental activism linking ecological issues to issues of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender. To explore these shifts in environmental politics worldwide, I examine two categories of nonprofit environmental organizations: environmental science organizations and multicultural environmental organizations. Results of an event count analysis show that, for nations, public education predicts the establishment of environmental science organizations. Multicultural environmental organizations were established later, in the 1980s and onward, and tended to be established in countries with preexisting environmental science organizations. I argue that social science theories of cultural modernization and postmodernization can best explain these patterns.

Adolescence, Sexual Aggression and the Criminal Law

SUMMARY Criminal law and criminal policy history is perceived as an evolution of legitimation: from a morality paradigm before the Seventies of last century to a utilitarian concept of interdisciplinary enlightenment and rationality, and on to a factual paradigm of risk containment, security orientation and mere exclusion since the Nineties. However, in the area of sexual crime, and especially as far as “the protection of minors” is concerned, Western law appears to have undergone an additional paradigm change, namely in reverting to moralistic principles in disregard of scientific insight. This process, for which victimology appears to be the door opener, is reflected in legal doctrine and criminal policy, in law enforcement, in populistic media and politics. This evolutionary process is interpreted as symptomatic for a post-modern trend in the globalised society where sexual behavior on one hand is blatantly and abusively commercialised, and on the other hand, if deviant, represents the psychologically ...

Book Review: Lifeskills and Career Counselling

Lifeskills and career counselling advocates an approach to career counselling which is in line with a postmodern trend that views career counselling as an aspect of lifeskills. The book consists of 20 chapters, and is divided into four parts.

La profesión y los valores militares en España

This paper analyses the perception that the Spanish officers have today about their profession, as well as specific values which pervade it. In order to achieve this it starts with civilinizational process described by Morris Janowitz. Next, it uses the slant popularized by Charles Moskos, because it allows one to distinguish between the institutional model from the occupational one, and from some hybrid types among them both. And finally, it raises some questions about the postmodern issues. It is deduced from the sources employed that Spanish Armed Forces look forward to advancing from the institutional to some other mixed form, which includes occupational values and postmodern trends. Not meaning a definite resignation of the features that suppose the traditional ethos of the Armed Forces.

No Longer Half-Baked: Food Studies and Women's History

Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton, eds. Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. viii + 288 pp. ISBN 0-415-93077-4 (pb). Laurel Kendall, ed. Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. viii + 206 pp. ISBN 0-8248-2488-1 (pb). Miriam Meyers. A Bite off Mama's Plate: Mothers' and Daughters' Connections through Food. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001. xi + 195 pp. ISBN 0-89789-788-9 (cl). Food is important," proclaims Warren Belasco in the opening sentence of his excellent introduction to the collection he has edited with Philip Scranton, Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. (2) Few would argue with that assertion. Food is, of course, central to life; no human being—or, indeed, any living creature—can survive for very long without it. As anthropologists have delineated, however, food not only answers our most basic physical needs, but also is central to social ritual and the construction of culture. Food plays a vital symbolic role in celebrations and religious ceremonies and is an important marker of social status, gender identity, and ethnic, religious, and national affiliations. The transition to modernity has seemingly intensified the importance of food in society. Food production, preparation, marketing, and consumption are intimately connected with modern and postmodern trends such as industrialization, the rise of mass media, imperialism, economic globalization, multiculturalism and, not least, the changing position of women. Food and its cultural ramifications pervade modern Western society. Bestseller lists highlight not just the latest cookbook but also Proustian-type memoirs and insider views of the food industry, novels that incorporate recipes into the narrative, and journalistic reportage on what one author has christened the "fast food nation."1 A popular cable network in the United States spotlights food and its related culture, and at least half a dozen popular magazines focus on cooking. Movies, from Babette's Feast to Big Night, center on food and eating. The restaurant, a modern invention that is a central facet of Western life, has altered perceptions about the public/private [End Page 197] distinction, the association of food and sociability, and women's domestic responsibilities, as well as feeding the growth of a low-wage service economy in many post-industrial countries. The growing popularity in the United States and Europe, at least, of restaurants serving "ethnic," "foreign," and fusion cuisine is a tangible reminder of an ongoing global diaspora. This intense interest in food and its attendant cultural innovations, which is so prevalent in Western popular culture today, has not elicited a corresponding enthusiasm from the academy, however. Indeed, anthropology is perhaps the one discipline whose practitioners have recognized food's importance beyond merely its biological necessity and have tried to incorporate that insight into their researches.2 In his overview of the current state of "food studies," as he dubs this new interdisciplinary field, Belasco points to several of the reasons why historians have generally ignored the study of food and its associated role in the culture, politics, and economy of various societies. There is, Belasco asserts, a "certain defensiveness" among food historians, who fear they will be perceived either as "overly discriminating gastronomes (à la Craig Claiborne)" or as "muckraking 'food police' (à la Upton Sinclair)."3 (4-5) This defensiveness that Belasco notes looms even larger when food studies is brought together with women's history. It would seem that women's historians should be at the forefront of historical explorations of food, given women's primary responsibility for preparation (and in some societies for production) of food, as well as the gendered aspects of food distribution and consumption characteristic of many different cultures. Yet, this has not been the case.4 As Belasco points out, the gendered dynamics of food production, preparation, and consumption in the home have tended to reinforce...

Atividade, linguagem e trabalho: oposições conceituais na teoria da atividade

This paper examines, in the textual production of the so-called Activity Theory (from Charles Goodwin, Yrjo Engestrom, Reijo Miettinen e Michael Cole), the theoretical and methodological dispute between marxism and postmodern trends, concerning the notions of activity, language and labour. The paper analyses polyphonic and discourse-ideological effects in the mentioned production, pointing out an attempt to sweep marxism away from Vigotski, Luria e Leontev. Also, the paper discusses the consequences to language and labour studies.

Postmodernizmas ir epistemologinio reliatyvizmo spąstai

This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming book - Critical Discourse in Sociology. Between Positivism and Postmodernism. The essay deals with the dilemmas of relativism. The sociological concept of relativity of last decades was formulated as the integral part of sociological inquiry, aimed at the methodological complexity and some critical character of sociological thought. The intellectual transformation of recent sociology has been accompanied by a proliferation of alternative theories and concepts. Given the acute understanding of socially determined and arbitrary character of knowledge, the new sociological identity is being shaped by the pluralist context of latter-day sociological inquiry. This essay attempts an appraisal of differences in alternative modes of knowledge by exploring critically its various thematic features. As sociology‘s ongoing internal struggles continue, it is appropriate to ask whether the multidimensional approach is able to employ its own relativistic elements and maybe analytic techniques in the process of keeping itself more useful to the social sciences. It is possible to identify some postmodern trends in contemporary sociology that are becoming quite diverse internally. It is clear, however, that sociologists attach a little deal of significance to these differentiating changes as one of the crucial criteria of the arrival of new and the more complex forms of theorizing. Sociologists devote also too little attention to the relationship between contemporary social transformations and the restructuring some basic concepts in sociology. Furthermore, the current debates on relativism in sociology do not account for the fact that “postmodernism”, as a distinct and multiparadigmatic intellectual activity, is unequally distributed throughout the history of the social sciences.
 The paper examines the problematic relationship between positivistic and postmodern sociology, using the recent development of the social sciences in Lithuania as a case study and discussing the alternative models of sociology and their implications for intellectual reflexivity and critical reconstruction in social sciences. The dilemmas of relativism are clear in Lithuanian social scientists’s treatment of what they calls “postmodernism”. The aim of this essay is to explore the dual relations between the positivistic and postmodern trends in sociology by specifying the historical aspects of its contemporary development. As a consequence of one-sided, undifferentiating understanding of postmodernism, the more narrow, monist and “purist” concept of science is shaped. The central thesis is that pursuit of a „pure” science model restricts the potentiality of sociological enterprise. The paper argues specifically for the differentiation of the concept of postmodernism and suggests a need for sociology to more thoroughly integrate postmodern insights into its theory and practice while highlighting such key aspects of the sociological tradition as the need to ground its discoursive forms in dialogical, conventional and communicative attempts. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate and make explicit some positive connections between explanatory and discursive forms of sociology examined from the perspective of critical social theory.

Imagining Rurality in the New Europe and Dilemmas for Spatial Policy

In the discourse on European integration from the mid 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s, rural space and rurality have been traditionally associated with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), while little attention has been devoted to the spatial development of the countryside. These approaches and policies were associated with a 'geographical imagination' of rural space and rurality as a place of production, where the emphasis was on sectoral policies. In Europe today the discourse has changed dramatically. The current dominant geographical imagination of rurality is shifted to consumption and leisure, following both specific structural trends internally to rural areas and the more general post-modern trend away from production per se . These trends are discussed in a highly influential European document, the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) introduced in Leipzig in 1994 and formally adopted in 1999. In this document a new language and new policy guidelines are introduced, which openly support the consumption/leisure imagination, introducing at the same time spatial policies, which will deal more effectively with urban and rural spaces. Bearing this in mind, this article will try first to describe the two phases of imagining rurality in Europe (production versus consumption/leisure) and second their impact on southern European (SE) rural regions.

The Idea of political marketing

Introduction Considerations on Market Analysis for Political Parties by Patrick Butler and Neil Collins Social-Psychological, Economic and Marketing Models of Voting Behavior Compared by John Bartle and Dylan Griffiths Market Analogies: The Marketing of Labor and the Origins of New Labor by John Bartle Kirchheimer's Catch-All Party: A Re-Interpretation in Marketing Terms by Stefan Eghbalian and Stefan Henneberg Understanding Political Marketing by Stefan Henneberg Conceptualizing Political Marketing: A Framework for Election Campaign Analysis by Dominic Wring Political Marketing and the Aestheticization of Politics: Modern Politics and Post-Modern Trends by Barrie Axford and Richard Huggins The Marketing of Political Marketing by Nicholas O'Shaughnessy

Nueve estudios sobre el espacio: Representación y formas de apropriación

Historians will find these provocative essays useful in rethinking the geographical aspect of our work. The editors divided the chapters into two groups: the first serves to introduce the reader to postmodern trends in geography; and the second part analyzes how social actors create regional identities in a given geographic space. Unlike many books produced from conferences, the papers in this collection work well together and the observations of the first section establish themes that the more empirical studies of the second half develop. Some contributions still read like presentations and could use more elucidation to achieve their ambitious objectives.Eric Van Young once wrote that, “Regions are like love—they are difficult to define, but we know them when we see them.” This collection agrees that the categories often used to define regions “objectively” (ethnicity, politics, hydrology, ecology), are rarely consistent. Regions are socially constructed and constantly changing but also grounded in space (p. 17). Another theme centers on how cartography represents space and how such representations are exercises in power and popular identity. Maps draw lines that reify regions, representing transitory social processes as concrete.Claude Bataillon’s article uses comparisons across Mexico to demonstrate the contradictory principles that divide space. Mexico contains economic, religious, administrative cities that are “centralizing poles” of regions, while at the same time activity is organized along networks (redes) tending to “equalize” relations between communities. Luc Cambrezy follows up on this theme pointing out how these networks challenge the hierarchical organization of space. The tools geographers have to represent information: lines, points and shaded “zones,” tend to privilege administrative units and emphasize “internal continuity and external discontinuity” of regions (p. 74). Alfred Siemens suggests maps are analogous to Bentham’s panopticon. They have a point of view that is fuereño y arribeño, a perspective drenched with power that has been especially detrimental to understanding Mexico’s tropical lowlands.Roberto Melville illustrates the state’s role in creating regions noting how development projects legislate the creation of regions out of watersheds. Jean-Yves Marchal and Rafael Palma Grayeb demonstrate that region has become una palabra vacia by ably deconstructing the traditional definitions of the Huasteca. Their essay proposes some alternative approaches that need further development.The volume’s second part provides insightful essays describing the relationships between popular identities, territory, and the state. Interactions between dominant and subaltern groups build geographical spaces from the bottom up. Emilia Velázquez demonstrates how subordinate indigenous groups preserved local controls as the government forced them to abandon communal land holding under the liberal state and later introduced land reform and cattle use after the revolution. José Velasco’s essay describes the fate of the Chinatecas relocated to a completely new territory when the Cerro de Oro dam flooded their traditional settlements. Velasco demonstrates that in spite of the coercive nature of this government controlled process (the state dictated settlements and aimed at “integrating” the natives into the national culture) the villagers recreated ethnic territories and identities on their own terms. Marielle Pepin Lehalleur compares four agricultural communities and finds villagers refused to accept the backward economic role national policy had assigned ejidatarios, demonstrating that popular agency, not state policy, determined local realities.Finally, Michel Agier meditates on the limitations of maps in portraying the network of social interactions that characterize the urban lives of the inhabitants of Salvador de Bahía, Brazil. The essay returns to the “question of scale” raised throughout the volume between local agency and the elusive cartographic dream of mapping reality.

The Systems Approach to Design, and Inquiring Information Systems: Scandinavian Experiences and Proposed Research Program

This paper starts with a short history of the application of dialectical social systems approach in Sweden in the sixties, and emphasizes its later application to the field of information or inquiring systems. This is followed by a reflection on the meeting between the systems approach and some other approaches mainly in Scandinavia and Europe, notably the postmodern aestheticist trends of the eighties which grew further in the nineties and now apparently dominate the stage of many computer applications in multimedia and virtual reality. The paper concludes with some reflections on the possible causes and import of these trends and possible shortcomings of the systems approach itself which make it difficult to offer the necessary resistance, requiring the future energetic work of systems researchers and educators in a proposed research program.

A critique of Baudrillard's hyperreality: towards a sociology of postmodernism

Through the critical examination of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, this article seeks to make a wider contribution to contempor ary debates about postmodernism. It draws on a post-Cartesian, Heideg gerian philosophy to demonstrate the weakness of the concept of hyperreality and reveal its foundation in a Cartesian epistemology. The article goes on to claim that this same Heideggerian tradition suggests a way in which the concept of hyperreality and nihilistic postmodern sociologies more generally might be dialectically superseded. Instead of these theories being seen as saying anything insightful about recent social transformations, the epistemological void in which they position themselves should be inter preted as the intellectual expression of the wider cultural and postmodern trend of transgression.

Collective Behavor and Social Movements in the Postmodern Age: Looking Backward to Look Forward

This article specifies several ways in which the collective behavior portion of Collective Behavior/Social Movement (CBSM) studies may be revitalized in the near future. The revitalization will occur because repertoires of extra-institutional challenge emerging in the postmodern age seem to fall outside the way social movements have been theorized in the last twenty-five years. Today's postmodern trends—increasing consumerism and affluence, individualism, demographic complexity, ideological diversity, global migration, and constant innovation in communications technology—have proliferated new social identities and deconstructed social identities imposed by the Other. As a result, postmodernity's complexities are multiplying the number of small, diverse, and diffuse groupings defining themselves in challenging ways outside the corridors of politics. Indeed these groupings may in the years to come recast what some see as a social movement society into a CBSM Society of diverse challenges to the institutional order.

Camel of Darkness, Selected Poems (1970-1990) (review)

Reviewed by: Camel of Darkness, Selected Poems (1970–1990) Vassilis Lambropoulos Yannis Patilis, Camel of Darkness, Selected Poems (1970–1990). Translated by Stathis Gourgouris. In Quarterly Review of Literature: Poetry Book Series, vol. 36 (1997). Princeton, New Jersey: QRL. Pp. 51. $12.00. In the wake of the experimental wave that swept all the arts in the 1960s, giving birth to postmodern trends and movements that continue to unfold today, no creative endeavor has experienced a greater crisis of confidence than poetry. It alone has chosen the path of dignified isolation to avoid the contamination of its tradition by mass culture and information, narcissistic adventures into hybridity, and the culture wars over the canon. For example, while painting, architecture, and dance have incorporated alien techniques and foreign elements, poetry (with few exceptions) has steadfastly protected its own distinct identity. While fiction, theater, and even opera have reached out to a broader, younger audience, poetry has increasingly detached itself from public taste. Furthermore, it has also abandoned much of its interest in aesthetic and other theoretical concerns while the essay, as a complementary mode of reflection and elucidation, no longer attracts its best practitioners. As a result of this withdrawal from poetics, poetry has forfeited the allegiance of its strongest supporters, the critic and the philosopher. Celan was the last living writer whose pieces inspired a thinker’s reflections. Poets now operate within a closed guild: they read, review, teach, and write for each other. Even the influential postcolonial literature has largely bypassed them. This unfortunate situation is as common in Greece as elsewhere in the Western world and beyond. But there it is all the more disappointing and puzzling, given the robust Greek poetic tradition of the last one hundred years. The popularity of the canonical poets from Dionysios Solomos to Manolis Anagnostakis persists but the canon remains unchanged: there have been no additions to it from the dead or the living for some four decades. There are, of course, specific factors that apply to the Greek case and need to be explored by both literary and intellectual history. Suffice it to say here that the bold experimentalists of the 1960s, many of whom coalesced around the pioneer magazine Pali, encountered great hostility from a contemporary counterproject, the academic canonization of the Generation of the 1930s. As far as the present isolation of poetry and the accompanying indifference of the public are concerned, though, the loss for writers and readers is mutual, and so is the responsibility for overcoming it. It may be time for some coordinated effort, in Greece and elsewhere, toward a new dialogue. Poets and critics might initiate exchanges that emphasize commonalties rather than differences. Obviously, this [End Page 149] would require learned familiarity with and determined confidence in each other’s work. The range of potential collaborations is broad, going from recognition to cooperation and from reviewing to translation. A rare and instructive example of such an exchange is the ongoing transatlantic collaboration between a poet and editor, Yannis Patilis, and a scholar and poet, Stathis Gourgouris. Its latest product, covering twenty years of Patilis’s career, is the anthology under review, published by the Quarterly Review of Literature in its distinguished “Poetry Book Series” (presenting the winners of its international poetry book competition). Patilis has long been involved in literature in many creative ways—as writer, critic, magazine editor, anthologist, and high school teacher, to mention the most important—and has been recognized as one of the major literary figures of his generation. His work has been translated into several languages but never before in such a comprehensive format. By presenting Patilis (b. 1947) to the English-reading audience in a selection that thoughtfully represents the formal and spiritual breadth of his poetry and in a translation that bristles with zest and inventiveness, Gourgouris (b. 1958) affords us a valuable opportunity to examine the status of Greek poetry today. Those who still judge verse according to the Elyto-Seferic model will be painfully disappointed by the length, tone, and worldview of these poems. But readers who are more attuned to the recent musical inventions by John Adams, the rhythm of films by Jim Jarmusch, the...

Ideologies and Forms of Domination in the Organization of the Global Production and Consumption of Goods in the Emerging Postmodern Era: A Case Study of Nike Corporation and the Implications for Gender

This paper uses a case study of Nike Corporation to examine some of the contradictory gender‐based ideologies involved in the two main processes of the production and consumption of athletic footwear: manufacturing and advertising. It uses the newly developing paradigm within world‐system theory, a commodity chain analysis, to compare and contrast the social relations of gender within each of these two segments at both the micro‐ and macro‐level. Noting the increasing importance of advertising and consumption patterns accompanying emerging post‐industrial, postmodern trends, this paper highlights the need for political economy analyses to address more cautiously cultural, political and social factors involved in the production and consumption of goods.This study employs an exploratory approach, using gender as a variable to detect linkages between the economic and cultural realms at the individual and global level. Drawing on some of the post‐Marxist literature, it points to new potential for alliances in forging social change. The main attempt is to expand upon development theory which tends to neglect the role of gender, while also expanding studies of gender by investigating gender issues within the framework of the global political economy.

Over-Writing the Body

Reality is already virtual. Our world is bathed and reflected in the blue light of video; in the glow of our monitors we immerse ourselves in the latest software and games; we thrill at our new deftness in surfing the net. And even when we are not given over to computers and the electronic media, we remain dominated by the cultural norms, the linguistic practices, and above all the images that proliferate through and around them.1 Thus today our lives are already being shaped-as in the near future they may be dominated-by the fastest growing new technology in history: Virtual Reality (VR). Yet for all its possibilities and seductions, a great part of the significance of VR is that it draws us to reflect on a broader, and far older, process, which could aptly be termed virtualization-and to recognize it as not merely a cultural, but a metaphysical, transformation. As virtualized, the environing world has been reduced to an equipmental array, with Nature merely the quantified raw material banked and ready for our manipulation, transformation, and control. This technological domination of the real represents a victory of abstracting, and seemingly disembodied, intelligence, over a more corporeal and elemental engagement in what is. The physical bodies that constitute our world, and our own involved and empowered bodies, have been overwritten by symbolic representations, by relational formulations and equivalence-by code. The phenomena of virtuality takes us to the metaphysical assumptions and underpinnings of the contemporary world which has produced-at last, and as its completion-the technology of Virtual Reality itself.2 It is this epoch of ours, with its scientific comprehension of nature, which has made VR possible, and the structure and evolution of which VR will profoundly effect. This reality of ours, as already virtual, as already discounted as mere phenomenal show, remains characterized by the feature Heidegger named forty years ago: the domination of what is by technicity-which is to say, the completion of metaphysics. But the peculiar fate of monolithic metaphysical thinking is that it continually subverts itself; even in Plato, the eros that is to propel the soul upwards towards the Hyper-Uranian Forms remains stubbornly and inalienably corporeal in its origin. The body not only resists the superimposition of reductive textuality, but itself underwrites the logocentric excursus: as I will argue, the virtualization of reality fails in its totalizing aspirations because it arises out of a prior insertion into, and implication with, the flesh of the real. My intention here is to phenomenologically interrogate the VR experience. As the foregoing suggests, I shall pursue this questioning in term of Heidegger's critique of technicity and the later ontology of Merleau-Ponty. VR has intriguing possibilities; I do not mean to deny or downplay these.3 But, even as we rush headlong into it, we need to examine it philosophically: what motivates and undergirds it? The view I develop here is that VR furthers both the project of Cartesian metaphysics--the domination of nature and of our own bodies-and the postmodern trend towards what Dillon has called semiotic reductionism. For Virtual Reality, at least in theory, reduces to a kind of digitalized abstraction my own corporeity, and the flesh of the world. But, as I shall argue here, on closer examination it becomes evident that it achieves its effects only by assuming, and building upon, a more primordial, embodied encounter with what is; the metaphysical fantasy of total comprehension and control--an old dream with new power and new dangers, in the hands of a new elite of magician-programmers-remains the fantasy of living, corporeal humans, and thus rooted not in a putative Cartesian certitude, but marked with the provisionality and partiality of an existential stance. Virtual Reality technology involves, in its very name, the project of creating a life-like simulated environment, an experience which is virtually real. …

The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study.

Raymond Carver, known in some circles as the “godfather of minimalism,” has been credited by many as the rejuvenator of the once-dying American short story. (See the link on this page to a 2008 Kenyon Review story that discusses the recent controversy over the editing of Carver's stories.) Drawing on representative tales from each of Carver's major volumes of fiction, Nesset's critical exploration leads us deep into the heart of Carver country, an eerie post-industrial world of low-rent survivors. In the earliest fiction, the politics of sex are tied to politics of fortune and chance; marriage as an institution is capricious and unsettling. In later stories, the gesture of telling stories provides an escape for certain of these characters, metaphorically and otherwise; and in Carver's last stories, subtle strategies of language offer a similar, if more tentative release. From beginning to end, Carver's distinctive, highly imitative style is intrinsic to his subject and is crucial in presenting what Carver called the “dark side of Reagan's America.” In this comprehensive study of Carver, Nesset discusses the relationship of minimalism and postmodern trends and the rise of new realism. By locating Carver in the gallery of American letters, Nesset shows him to be at once more simple and more complex than we might have believed, skillfully laying the groundwork for Carver studies to come.

Placing Our Counseling Texts in Context: A Reply to Lyddon

Following Lyddon (1995), contextualist understandings of development, including dialectical change and cognitive construction, are distinguished from organismic perspectives on the basis of the distinction between formal and final causation. Life‐span developmental and postmodern contextualist trends are offered as a viable framework for emerging counseling theories that seek to capture the diversity of human development.