POSTMODERN CULTURE MAGAZINE

A reference from the World Wide Web
PROGAMME NOTE: This journal started in September 1990 at North Carolina State University. It calls itself an electronic journal of interdisciplinary criticism and is available only electronically. That symbolizes the interrelatedness of electronic information technologies and postmodernism as such. Now it is published jointly by NCSU, Oxford University Press, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. We link to it through UVA. All back issues are archived and available through this link. We feel the frisson of postmodern studies in the articles appearing here. The crossovers and mixtures of popular culture and theoretical concepts account for much of this. Also, the traditional academic disciplines expand their boundaries here. They take new shapes and are at times clothed as something else; or they become unrecognizable. In the September 1995 issue, to give the flavor, we find pieces on "Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable," by Stephen Baker; and "Outrageous Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons," by Rhonda Garelick.

We call attention to a review of Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, in the September 1995 issue by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.

We call attention to Charles Bernstein, The Second War and Postmodern Memory in the January 1991 issue. Note that Bernstein's title is a take-off on Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory. Our essay, To Bear the Unbearable, addresses the sensibility generated by WWII in a similar vein.

We call attention to Mikhail Epstein, HYPER in 20th Century Culture: The Dialectics of Transition from Modernism to Postmodernism, in the January 1996 issue.

We call attention to Linda Ray Pratt, A Postmodern Foundation for Poltical Practice? in the January 1994 issue. Pratt reviews John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics. Her commentary is useful on the possibilities for a viable postmodern politics. The review, and McGowan as such, thus are relevant to the project of Honi Haber. Haber is in search of a viable politics that moves beyond the self-cancellations of postmodern political theory. McGowan, according to Pratt, sees possibilities for such in a too-optimistic light. Haber, at least in the book referred to here, has not arrived at an answer; rather, she has demonstrated the inadequacies of major postmodern theory.

Postmodern Culture Magazine has become a participant in the MUSE project at Johns Hopkins University. Only the current issue of the magazine is available without charge on the WWW. Back issues are archived with MUSE. Ursinus is a subscriber to MUSE. THE PROGRAMME thereby has access to the back issues.

18 January 1996; updated 21 May 1997
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