SUNY series in Postmodern Culture

An introduction to the philosophical, economic, historical, feminist, and cultural versions of post-Marxist theory.

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

Uses satirical parodies of screenplays and political blogs to reveal the cracks in our post-9/11 American psyche.

In This Is a Picture and Not the World, Joseph Natoli employs the lingua franca of film itself-screenplay dialogue-as well as the more recent form of the political blog to present a hyperreal account of popular film as both a creator and a reflector of our post-9/11 mass psyche. Drawing on both classic and contemporary film examples, the book also offers a quasihistory of film genres, including science fiction, the western, film noir, and screwball comedy, emphasizing how these genres have been shaken up, recontextualized, recombined, turned self-reflexive, and parodied over the past couple of decades. Taken together, these satirical parodies of screenplays and blogs reveal and perform how our very gaze has shifted from modern to postmodern, from a direct view of the world to a filtered one.

Explores and critiques the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment as a convention in twentieth-century American fiction, from the standpoint of postmodernism.

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

Investigates a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture to address the role of history in postmodern cultural productions.

Productive Postmodernism addresses the differing accounts of postmodernism found in the work of Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, a debate that centers around the two theorists' senses of pastiche and parody. For Jameson, postmodern texts are ahistorical, playing with pastiched images and aesthetic forms, and are therefore unable to provide a critical purchase on culture and capital. For Hutcheon, postmodern fiction and architecture remain political, opening spaces for social critique through a parody that deconstructs official history. Thinking in the space between these two sharply different positions, the essays in this collection investigate a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture-from such narratives as Don DeLillo's Libra, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, to the vastly different spaces of Las Vegas casinos and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum-in order to ask what the cultural work of a postmodern aesthetic might be.

Moves from Beethoven to Buffy to examine the blurred nexus of elite and popular culture in the twenty-first century.

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

Explores the post-Enlightenment obsession with apocalyptic endings.

Applying Jean Baudrillard's question "What are you doing after the orgy?" to the postmillennial climate that informs our contemporary cultural moment, this book argues that the imagination of apocalyptic endings has been an obsessive theme in post-Enlightenment culture. Dominic Pettman identifies and examines the dynamic tensions of various apocalyptic discourses, from the fin-de-siècle decadents of the 1890s to the fin-de-millènnium cyberpunks of the 1990s, in order to highlight the complex constellation of exhaustion, anticipation, panic, and ecstasy in contemporary culture. Through analyses of rapturous cults, cyberpunk literature, post-apocalyptic cinema, techno-paganism, death fashion, and the Y2K prophecy, After the Orgy explores why the twentieth century swung so violently between the poles of anticipation and anticlimax. In the process, the book raises pressing questions concerning the relevance of such ideas in our new millennium and points out alternatives to the monotonous horror of traditional narratives.

Uses literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to explore the emerging logic of the posthuman.

Adding to the growing field of posthuman or cyborg studies, TechnoLogics explores how our position in the technologized world reorders, in the most radical ways imaginable, our basic experience of the lines governing literary, philosophical, and cultural production. The ancient dream of immortality is now becoming realized through cloning, genetic research, and artificial intelligence, bringing with it the need for new forms of both reading and living in the everyday world. In this emerging cyborg culture, what is to come for us is not predictable but, instead, an open possibility to be shaped by the work of, among others, artists, computer designers, scientists, and writers. Through encounters with Plato, Melville, Marx, Jünger, Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren identifies the causes, characteristics, and links between the most primordial of wishes-immortality-and the highest of high tech, and asks how, in our culture of technocapitalism, we can continue to listen to the faint call of ethics.

Explores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.

2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

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

Explores the way chaos theory is incorporated in the work of such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Don DeLillo, and Michael Crichton.

Beautiful Chaos is the first book to examine contemporary American fiction through the lens of chaos theory. The book focuses on recent works of fiction by John Barth, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, Michael Dorris, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Carol Shields, and Robert Stone, all of whom incorporate aspects of chaos theory in one or more of their novels. They accomplish this through their disruption of conventional linear narrative forms and their use of strategic tropes of chaos and order, but also-and more significantly for an understanding of the interaction of science and fiction-through their self-conscious embrace of the current rhetoric of chaos theory.

Since the publication of James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science in 1987, chaos theory has been taken up by a wide variety of literary critics and other scholars of the arts. While considering the relationship between chaos theory and recent American fiction, Beautiful Chaos details basic assumptions about orderly and dynamic systems and the various manifestations of chaos theory in literature, including mimesis, metaphor, model, and metachaotics. It also explains particular features of orderly and dynamic systems, including entropy, bifurcation and turbulence, noise and information, scaling and fractals, iteration, and strange attractors.

Examines Sukenick's role in reshaping the American literary tradition.

In Musing the Mosaic prominent critics of postmodern and contemporary fiction and culture discuss the fictional and theoretical works of Ronald Sukenick, one of the most important American writers to emerge from the late 1960s. Sukenick has been a prolific participant in reshaping the American literary tradition for two generations and played a pivotal role in the creation and growth of the Fiction Collective and FC2 publishing houses, as well as the journals American Book Review and Black Ice Magazine. In his work he argues that contemporary fiction can neither perform traditional functions nor rely on any conventions in an ever-more dynamic world. Staying true to Sukenick's own creative style, one that takes the seams out of writing before re-stitching it in ways that are truly novel, the contributors examine how and why his writing comes closer to the dissolving, fragmentary nature of reality and its lack of closure than perhaps anything written before it.

Contributors include Mark Amerika, Nancy Blake, Marcel Cornis-Pope, JR Foley, Charles Harris, Ursula Heise, Jerome Klinkowitz, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Lance Olsen, Matthew Roberson, Charles Russell, Campbell Tatham, and Steve Tomasula.

Memoir meets cultural criticism in this examination of American popular culture at the end of the century.

Mixing memoir and cultural criticism, Memory's Orbit examines the intersections between a wide range of films and current events, finding its theme and orbiting narrative structure in the personal stories we live within and their relationship to the social and cultural order. Joseph Natoli covers such films as The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, and American History X, as well as such headline events as the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., the dot-com boom, the WTO protests in Seattle, and Bush versus Gore, consistently identifying those aspects of the social order that have shaped his narrating frame. Eschewing theoretical exposition and jargon, Natoli performs postmodern critique, and this book continues his innovative work in the genre of cultural studies.

Explores the role and function of the autopsy in Western culture, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lecture to The X-Files and CSI.

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

Examines the crucial role that coming-of-age narratives have played in American feminism.

From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism. Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth century their coming-of-age narratives finally voice this knowledge. Addressing a variety of themes-awakening sexuality, the body's metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into feminine gender roles-these narratives reject the heroine's narrative ending in romance, allowing American women writers to create alternative subjectivities by rejecting the notion that identity is ever fixed. While activists have succeeded in winning legal battles that have changed the legal status of women, these narratives perform the cultural work of exposing the painful contradictions faced by women as they come of age.

Explores the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonnegut's work.

"I've worried some about why write books when presidents and senators and generals do not read them, and the university experience taught me a very good reason: you catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world." - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's desire to save the planet from environmental and military destruction, to enact change by telling stories that both critique and embrace humanity, sets him apart from many of the postmodern authors who rose to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s. This new look at Vonnegut's oeuvre examines his insistence that writing is an "act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen." By exploring the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonnegut's work, Todd F. Davis demonstrates that, over the course of his long career, Vonnegut has created a new kind of humanism that not only bridges the modern and postmodern, but also offers hope for the power and possibilities of story. Davis highlights the ways Vonnegut deconstructs and demystifies the "grand narratives" of American culture while offering provisional narratives-petites histoires-that may serve as tools for daily living.

Examines the increasingly prevalent assumption that postmodernism is over and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics.

The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists-from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch-Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come.

Josh Toth teaches literature and critical theory at Grant MacEwan College and is coeditor (with Neil Brooks) of The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism.

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

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