This chapter begins by helping the reader to grasp the comprehensive nature of Nathaniel Berman's work, and the subtle perspective that he brings to the legal world when it is confronted by the passions to which nationalism and colonialism give rise. In his work, cultural Modernism interacts with the international law of Danzig; the fantasies surrounding Jerusalem with the concrete political and legal projects for that city; internationalist dreams with the institutional programs for Bosnia and Palestine; and the most industrious international bureaucracy with the most creative and audacious legal imagination. Berman makes use of all of the notions in the course of his work on "imperial ambivalences". His goal is to show that we cannot interpret the international law of the interwar period without understanding it as a site of Modernist cultural construction and contestation - rather than as a mere adjunct to, or reflection of, cultural developments external to it. Keywords:colonialism; cultural Modernism; imperial ambivalences; international law; Nathaniel Berman; nationalism

A Critical Introduction

.......................................................................................................................................... i Tiivistelmä..................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................... iii List of Publications........................................................................................................................ v

Quest/ion of Identities in African American Feminist Postmodern Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks

The encyclopedic tendency is based upon the human urge to summarize and organize the information pertaining to the world around us. According to Richard Yeo, such a summary is mainly intended for p...

Gravity's Encyclopedia Revisited: The Illusion of a Totalizing System in Gravity's Rainbow

I approach Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Fucking A from the perspectives of postmodern drama and show how the discourse of postmodernism enables Parks to make intertextual links with some other literary works in order to reinvent the past and address a number of social ills and historical scars in the present. I also explore a number of key preoccupations of postmodern aesthetics, which contribute to the creation of indeterminacies in the play and argue how the creation of indeterminacies enables the playwright to increase incredulity toward a number of dominant metanarratives—manifesting themselves in the form of ruling economic, social, cultural, and political systems. Furthermore, I show how Parks raises the issue of African American history and imprints it from a fresh perspective to reshape identities for African Americans in her neo-slave narrative.

Wanted: Debt or Alive in Suzan-Lori Parks’s FA

The work of William Gaddis has been described as both “encyclopedic” and, less charitably, “unreadable.” This essay explores Gaddis’s evolving attitudes about the aesthetic of the “unreadable” and its didactic value through a reading of J R and Agapē Agape. While many antirealist writers disavow cognitivist approaches to literature, which assert that fiction may convey knowledge, Gaddis’s work, I argue, harbors more complex attitudes about the postmodern novelist’s didactic agency. In staging its characters’ repeated failure to teach, learn from, or “read” each other, J R calls for an alternative model of apprehending experience, one in which readers must remain open to the potential cognitive value of initial misunderstandings. Gaddis’s posthumously published Agapē Agape, however, is characterized by a more retrograde elitism in which unstructured antirealist excess courts failure of an unproductive variety, suggesting that a deliberate shift toward unreadability alone cannot reinvigorate fiction...

“Paradox, Perversity, Opacity, Obscurity”: William Gaddis and the Antirealist Syllabus

"Plot, character, setting and theme", according to John Hawkes, perhaps the first post-World War II antirealist, constitute "the true enemies of the novel". Working from that position, John Kuehl looks at 11 literary traits the post modern antirealist finds user friendly, in a pattern search through the works of some of today's most imaginative writers - Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Gass, Pynchon and Vonnegut, to name only a few - from some who have made it to the top of the bestseller lists to other barely known outside academic circles. Framing the study are an introduction by James W. Tuttleton, grouding the contemporary works in the context of early American writings by such countertraditionalists as Irving, Poe, Howells and Twain, and an interview in which the editor challenges the author as devil's advocate fro the realists, thrus enriching both points of view.

James Welsey Tuttleton

Papers

Alternate Worlds: A Study of Postmodern Antirealistic American Fiction