...Arif Dirlik Postmodernism and Chinese History Arif Dirlik This essay considers questions raised by postmodernism with spe- cific reference to issues in the historiography of China. If I spend more time working through...

...John A. McClure In “`Do You Believe in Magic?' Literary Thinking After the New Left,” Sean McCann and Michael Szalay argue that postmodern American novelists, by celebrating “the spontaneous, the symbolic, and ultimately the magical” undermine the good sense of progressive thought and contribute...

... as poststructuralism, just as Spanosian postmodernism is at odds with canonical versions of the postmodern. During times of theoretical apathy and indifference, what sets apart Spanos’s legacy is its underlying ethics of care, and its indefatigable passion for resistance and oppositional thinking. This essay...

...,” absorptive reading environments aim to dampen the shocks associated with both modernist fractures and postmodern counter-absorptive verse, canceling themselves out as they release the reader/spectator into a state of distraction. However, their reception by a reader trained to forge connections and to follow...

... project for Wallace. At the same time that he critiques the postmodern parochialism of the US culture industries, he uses his proleptic style to force his readers into experiencing dread when encountering American consumer culture. Ultimately, Wallace takes himself to be an example of the sort of limited...

...Henry Veggian “Anachronisms of Authority: Authorship and Exchange Value in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King ” considers the materiality of the printed book where postmodern theories of culture intersect with the contemporary economics of the print publishing, digital publishing, and antiquarian...

... the relative disappearance of the discourse of Mutually Assured Destruction. Through recursively inverting what he called postmodern metafiction’s “Armageddon-explosion,” I argue that Wallace attempts to articulate an anti-eschatological imagination capable of attending to the second nuclear age. Paying...

... of the paranoid relation to institutions characteristic of an earlier generation of postmodern writers and his inhabitation, instead, of various forms of institutional being. In this context, the political and other limits of Wallace’s project are revealed in the awkwardness of its engagements with the question...

... oriented to produce a visibility that discloses the set of metaphysical and material aspects related to contemporary intellectual practices, which makes it difficult to assign his work to any standard category (professional philosophy, postmodernism, poststructuralist criticism, etc.). In this essay, I...

... distinct forms of competition with journalism, on the one hand, and television, on the other. He comments on his relation as a writer to Western postmodernism and the concept of national allegory, on the meaning of innocence, the phenomenology of love, and the novelist's responsibility to both national...

... length, along with his differences from postmodernism, liberalism, and proceduralism. Dussel argues against formalism in favor of a model that incorporates three elements: validity conditions, a feasibility threshold, and a material principle. The material principle is primary, from which Dussel...

...Rob Wilson From the Sublime to the Devious: Writing the Experimental/Local Pacific Rob Wilson 1. ‘‘Two Postmodernisms’’ At times in the Pacific, it seemed to some, the experimental...

... such as Jameson and Perry Anderson. Though Jameson’s work on modernism and postmodernism is the much better known of the two, Anderson’s will also be considered here because it has usefully ‘‘rewritten’’ Jameson in ways that attempt to reinsert social and political levels that Jameson’s work, focused...

..., and American Cultural Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Bennett, Oliver. Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Blackburn, Anne M. Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic...

... If there is anything that contemporary history—especially the Viet- nam War—and the theory that in large part was instigated by it have dis- 5983 b2 27:1 / sheet 158 of 237 closed to this postmodern generation of critics, it is that the European con...

..., code failure, and the securitystate apparatus of everyday fear and trembling: a time of transna- tional wanhope, ungraspable totality, and cultural differentiation when “this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and super- structural expression of a whole new wave...

... Contributors Arif Dirlik is Knight Professor of Social Science and professor of history and cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon, as well as professor of history and cultural anthropology at Duke University. He is author of Postmodernity’s Histories (2000), and has edited...

... imbedded by Americanists into the postmodern context, I want, in this second installment, to think Melville’s attunement to ‘‘that profound Silencethat divine thing without a name’’ from which ‘‘those imposter philosophers pretend somehow to have got an answer’’ 2—in terms of the directives for thought...

... previously filled by divine creativity with existential self-­assertion. The legitimacy of the modern era consists in the fact that, in the absence of any divine order that they may observe, humans determine to make what they can of their lives in this world. I am not antimodern. Postmodern...

... Imagination: Totemism, Textuality, and Ecocriticism. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, Calif.: Stan- ford University Press, 2000. 288 boundary 2 / Fall 2000 Doy, Gen. Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity. London and New...