Showing papers in "Contemporary Literature in 1992"

Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson

Abstract: n recent years science fiction has with some success struggled against its ghettoization as lowbrow genre fiction. Readers and critics have defended science fiction as having not only a tradition of its own but also considerable overlap with modernist and postmodernist literature. Simultaneously, theorists like Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Donna Haraway have turned to SF as, in Annette Kuhn's words, "a privileged cultural site for enactments of the postmodern condition" (178). Indeed, for many cultural critics, SF has become the pre-eminent literary genre of the postmodern era, since it alone seems capable of understanding the rapid technological and cultural changes occurring in late capitalist, postindustrial society. In spite of this highbrow interest in science fiction, borders are still policed, and the SF ghetto endures. Even an apologist for SF like Darko Suvin can say dismissively that only "5 to 10 percent of SF" is "aesthetically significant" in contrast to the ninety to ninetyfive percent that is "strictly perishable stuff" (vii). As Roger Luckhurst notes, in the postmodern discourse about SF, science fiction is seen as borrowing from the mainstream "always belatedly, derivatively, and in degraded form" (362). SF may have acquired a new visibility outside its own coterie, especially among theorists, but old value hierarchies still work to keep SF books out of the hands of highand middlebrow readers. Hence, like the New Wave and ecofeminist SF of the 1960s and 1970s, cyberpunk, the most significant development in science fiction in the 1980s, is not widely known

Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J. M. Coetzee's "Foe"

Abstract: ho is the foe figured as antagonist by the title of J. M. Coetzee's Foe? Of this title-authorized by a prize-winning white South African writer, who is also a linguist, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of General Literature, a "colonizer who refuses"--one might well ask the question: in what mode of intellectual seduction does this title entitle the reader to participate? The first temptation, given Coetzee's stature and the status of South African literature as contiguous with the political, is the obvious and historical one: that this "foe" will be-again-those who design, uphold, live amidst, fail to dismantle, or fail to detach themselves from systemic racial dominance. And yes, the foe to which Coetzee alludes could so be described, but ...

An Interview with J. M. Coetzee

Abstract: chapters on a wide range of writers D. H. Lawrence, Desiderius Erasmus, Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zbigniew Herbert, Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach as well as on people who aren't usually thought of as writers the apartheid theorist Geoffrey Cronje and on a variety of topics in the field of censorship: the feminist critique of pornography, the history of so-called publications control in South Africa, your personal experience of working under censorship. Obviously there is a certain South African bias to the book, and secondarily perhaps a bias toward the Russian or East European experience; but beyond expressing your general opposition to censorship (which won't be news to anyone, I am sure), I wonder whether you can say what the general thesis of the book is.

Jorie Graham: Art and Erosion

Abstract: orie Graham emerged in the 1980s as a major poet, distinguished for her philosophical depth, her sensuous vision, the grandeur of her style and themes. In a decade of poetry stigmatized for its shrunken ambition, or sidetracked by politics and ideology, she celebrated the spiritual and metaphysical reach of art. In her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Graham limited her meditation primarily to tentative reflections based on natural objects. Erosion (1983) marked a striking maturity for this poet in finding a focus to the roving eye of Hybrids, and in understanding the iconic and even sacramental nature of her mind. Her language in this volume is marked by eloquence and sententious boldness, and she identifies her project more directly with that of monumental artists from the past. While ordered around a passion for mystery, the poems themselves aspire to the unity and completeness of an artifact rather than the residue of a process. Whatever twists of thought may arise in the poems end in a tied, integrated imagery, a tense unity. Graham's emphasis on iconic representation and visual design in Erosion expresses at once her strong sense of the body and her resistance to the force of erosion. Painting rather than nature becomes her primary model for how we can pursue the invisible in the visible, how we can shape our limitations into a form that can surpass them. In relation to the word, the visual icon seems inexhaustible, infinitely deep, yet centered. Art is the implicit answer to Graham's query, "in what manner the body is united with the soule." It forms an alternative space to the world of erosion, a form of "rescue" from

Toward the Postmodern Historical Imagination: Mass Culture in Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" and Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine"

Abstract: end of empire, at the dawn of a new age, on the forefront of progress, or just muddling through. Of course, these attitudes are not mutually exclusive. The end of an era is simultaneously the beginning of a new one, and while we may feel that mass culture by its nature brings constant change and innovation, we may also feel that plus (a change, plus c'est la meme chose. The term "mass culture" has always lent itself to this kind of paradoxical thinking. Mass culture can represent both the cutting edge of progress and the decline of civilization; it can be both the means by which the masses achieve democratic participation in culture and the means by which a power elite manipulates the masses into consumerist passion and political quietism; it both educates and indoctrinates, stimulates and enervates, pleases and bores. Mass culture is both problem and promise, and its insistent presence urges us to look backward to either a lost golden age or a time of drudgery and deprivation, forward to either paradise or disaster.1

Stevie Smith's Voices

Abstract: mong tales of sixties poetry festivals, jazz-infused events that sometimes drew crowds in the thousands, one finds the legend of a woman in her sixties, small and frail, wearing schoolgirl dresses and white stockings, often sharing the stage with a much younger, denimand leather-clad male gang. Such a setting (like that of a jewel) encapsulates a dominant impression of Stevie Smith's relationship to other poets, since a striking originality, a complete separation from poetic fashion, is for many the hallmark of her work. Yet the key appeal of Smith's immensely popular, show-stealing performances was not her oddball appearance but rather her voice, as she spoke and sang her poems in a chanting, off-key manner that could be hilarious and haunting, powerful and unsettling.1 Detached from her inimitable delivery, this highly stylized manner still comes through to Smith's readers, producing many comments on the "voice" of her poetry itself. Robert Lowell thus speaks for others when he warmly notes "her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice," a quality many would identify in her best-known poem:

Marginality in the Margins: Robert Duncan's Textual Politics

Abstract: major preoccupation of much postmodern cultural theory is its almost theological interest in transgression. Violation, cross-dressing, abjection, subversion, and infection have become tropic alternatives to various forms of totalized discourse. In its attempt to undermine hierarchies implicit in binary structures, postmodernism searches for the occluded or effaced term (writing, the subaltern, the semiotic) whose marginality contests the authority of Sign and Subject. Far from simply inverting the poles of the Saussurian model in a kind of negative theology of the signifier, recent theory has focused on the space between poles as a kind of fractal landscape where heterogeneity and eroticized play reign. At stake in much of this discussion is a spatial metaphor-whether in the form of a map, a body, or a text-whose autonomy is challenged by the existence of an unspecified outside, or hors-texte. A recent museum lecture series, announced as "Rethinking Bor

The Closing of the American Line: Expansive Poetry and Ideology

Abstract: Narrative. Among the movement's most vocal advocates and theorists are Dick Allen, Frederick Feirstein, Frederick Turner, Dana Gioia, Robert McDowell, Thomas Fleming, Gerald Harnett, and Brad Leithauser. Among its most highly acclaimed poets are Leithauser, Gioia, Turner, Timothy Steele, and Charles Martin.1 The movement has also been promoted by the criticism of such figures as Steele, Bruce Bawer, Christopher Clausen, and Robert McPhillips. Magazines associated with Expansive poetry include The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Reaper, Hellas, Chronicles, and The Kenyon Review (new series) under Turner's editorship. The move-

"Zero Pays the House": The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette

Abstract: T he history of Las Vegas as we know it almost exactly coincides with the nuclear age, beginning with the construction of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel in 1945. In the 1950s, this city in the middle of nowhere suddenly found itself next to the Nevada Test Site, prompting one native to complain, "It annoys me to read about some statesman saying that the world is living with the atomic bomb. . . . Damn it, it's not the world. It's Las Vegas" (Lang 100). While this resident was correct about the radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, he underestimated the power of imaginative association. Just as Nathanael West, E Scott Fitzgerald, and others had found Hollywood to be a fitting extrapolation of American culture, a new generation of writers has come to use a peculiar conflation of Las Vegas and the bomb as the symbol and landscape of the cold war and its attendant reign of terror. The group of writers I discuss is necessarily large-including Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and Hunter S. Thompson-because I wish to demonstrate their unanimity in associating Las Vegas with the bomb.

An Interview with Isabel Allende

Abstract: MP: Where do you think you got your sense of story telling? IA: In the kitchen. Listening to the maids tell stories. Listening to the radio. In Latin America there is a long tradition of soap operas that started with "The Right to Be Born". Imagine what that was! I remember being very small and coming back from school running to hear the next chapter of the soap opera. Always very tragic stories and very sad stories too. I have that in Eva Luna. When Eva Luna is a child she lives in the kitchen. She is a maid, and she listens to the radio. That's the only contact she has with the world. And all the stories that she hears she believes are true stories—I believed when I was a child that they were all true stories. So I thought that the world was full of very interesting people and it was just me that was always bored. Everybody else was having these wonderful love affairs ex cept me. VI: When did you start telling stories? IA: When I was very small. My mother says that I terrorized my brothers with horrible long truculent stories that haunted their days and filled their nights with nightmares. After I had my own children I also told them stories. They would give me the first sentence and immediately I would start the story. I was trained then. I've lost that training now. I've always liked it. I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time. VI: Lying? IA: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying. MP: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth? IA: For me, I can no longer say. At the beginning there is some truth always. For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I

Textured Information: Politics, Pleasure, and Poetry in the Eighties

Abstract: iven the heavily divided, factionalized character of American poetry during the 1980s, it might seem difficult to find some common tendency underlying the many competing practices and styles on display. Yet zeitgeists have a way of cutting across party lines, and it's my belief that a fairly distinct period style has indeed emerged over the last ten years, one that undergoes dramatic modulations as it passes from camp to camp, school to school, yet nevertheless retains its basic identity through all these shifts. I want to focus here on this shared style or mode, particularly as it manifests itself around the highly charged relations between pleasure and politics. At the heart of eighties poetics in all its forms, I would suggest, is an urgent and deeply anxious desire to bridge these two realms. This will hardly seem like an earth-shattering revelation, since poetry has always had to wrestle with the rival claims of pleasure and politics, the aesthetic and the social, private experience and public responsibility. What gives this relationship its distinctive tone in the eighties, I think, is the staggering sense of just how far apart the two poles are, how profoundly at odds with each other, how difficult to align. It's this urge to make the pleasures of poetry somehow answerable to the intransigent realities of the social and political world that gives rise to what I'm calling the period style of the eighties, with all its exaggerated dislocations and shifts of reference.'

"Moondust in the Prowling Eye": The "History" Poems of Robert Lowell

Abstract: s its title suggests, Robert Lowell's History (1973)composed of poems selectively culled and revised from two preceding volumes, Notebook 1967-68 (1969) and Notebook (1970)-presents itself as a book of or about history.' At any rate, it looks like a history, albeit one of an extremely heterogeneous and idiosyncratic variety. Lowell's version of this history begins with the Garden of Eden-though Orpheus is there, with Charles Darwin not far behind-and follows a rough chronology, pausing for "snapshot[s], / lurid, rapid, garish, grouped" ("Epilogue," Day by Day 127) of "The Spartan Dead at Thermopylae," "Cleopatra Topless," "The Worst Sinner, Jonathan Edwards' God," the poet's own "First Love," "Stalin," "Harpo Marx," and "The New York Intellectual," among others. What must startle the reader at first are the innumerable kings, nomads, revolutionaries, generals, prophets, and sages that people Lowell's imagination. We cannot help but be reminded of the poet as a young man "skulk[ing] in the attic," reciting "two hundred French generals by name, / from A to V-from Augereau to Vandamme" ("Commander Lowell," Life Studies 70). (Indeed, that encyclopedic ambition, submerged in the Notebooks, is one of the animating principles of History.) Despite its scope, curiously enough, each poem in History seems to tell the same story or, at the very least, the same kind of story. Lowell begins with a sense of history as rupture, of human action truncated by the imperium of death, leaving a legacy of "old tins,

Contemporary Poetry as Philosophy: Subjective Agency in John Ashbery and C. K. Williams

Abstract: form for treating all moments as analogous opportunities. The lovers affirm not only the moments that their story makes possible but also the condition of connectedness that secures their relationship because of how they can engage the flow of time. And since this connectedness does not depend on any single images or specific idealized qualities, their modest exchange yields access to a mode of sublimity in which the very form of lovers' time opens on to an open future. Ultimately these reflections on "really now" lead us back to the poem's title as its emblem for the transformations of traditional romance agency that Ashbery accomplishes. On one level "As We Know" is astonishingly anti-ideal. It calls up all the banalities which constitute love's quotidian reality and define "the way we had come." But what the title denies itself on the level of romantic content, it claims for itself in relation to the state of reflective activity achieved within the poem's final gesture. This "now" has substance only as the lovers form a "we" in the process of telling itself. Similarly a moment becomes "really now" only as two sensibilities contour themselves to it-temporally by yielding their attention and modally by recognizing that the very substance of the moment is two independent ways of knowing joined through the "as" of the telling. There a "we" is composed. And there the "as" sanctifies that "we" by calling attention indexically to precisely the poem's processes of intensification, as we read. Yet we need no image, and no projected identities. The "really now" literally takes place as a relational mode within the activity of speaking-mimetically between the poem's lovers and psychologically in the reader's experience of this dynamics of telling becoming a figure for his or her own powers to make subjective investments without specular projections. I do not think any philosopher gives us as fully developed a rendering of subjective agency immanent to the indexical uses of language, yet thereby capable of establishing long-term aspects of identity for the agents. But in order to understand and provide a context for this achievement we must turn to the history of ideas so as to clarify the specific pressures on contemporary sensibilities that Ashbery is responding to and to indicate some of the conceptual possibilities that This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:41:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

"Taking Chances": The Feminine Genealogy of Style in Marianne Hauser's The Talking Room

Abstract: Ithough Marianne Hauser is often praised by contemporary writers (Anais Nin, Raymond Federman, Steve Katz, among others), she still waits to be "discovered" as both an experimental and a feminist fiction writer. It is not by accident that Katz singles out the reception of Hauser's fiction as an example of the amnesiac quality of our culture: "Marianne Hauser is a national treasure kept in the attic. Her peculiar point of view of the world and her impeccable, witty, acerbic prose are displayed brilliantly in her two last books, The Talking Room and The Memoirs of the Late Mr Ashley" (758). This description is terribly ironic, although the irony has probably not been intended by the author. It is rather an instance of the irony of history: at the moment when so many sensitive feminist readers are engaged in rescuing women writers from the "attics" of our cultural past, interesting women writers of today are still being relegated to that curious space of semioblivion.1 As far as academic or feminist criticism is concerned, Hauser's prose is indeed packed somewhere in the attic of the literary scene of New York City. This discussion of her novel The Talking Room (1976) is a small but long overdue gesture toward reclaiming her prose for readers interested in the intersection of postmodernism and feminism.

"A Seizure of Voice": Language Innovation and a Feminist Poetics in the Works of Kathleen Fraser

Abstract: T he term "Language poetry" has been used for the past two decades to describe a diverse and expansive group of poets whose works, Stephen Fredman tells us, put "into question ... our assumptions about poetry, language, and discourse" (150).1 In its responses to poststructuralist theories, Language poetry has engaged in a relationship with theoretical discourse that self-consciously foregrounds the political nature of language and of theory itself. Yet, as such critics as Marianne DeKoven remind us, much of the discussion of this new avantgarde, and the most prominent recognition of its practitioners, involves primarily the major male figures, while the women engaging in language innovations remain "safely buried" from general regard:

Collage and Pulverization in Contemporary American Poetry: Charles Bernstein's "Controlling Interests"

Abstract: This passage from the poem "Standing Target" isn't so much a narrative as the drastic prolepsis of one; it encapsulates a life that it invites us to think of as both professional and personal, and we might unfold any number of narratives out of it, each proceeding in the terms this pair of sentences deploys. Rather than unpacking this thumbnail sketch, though, Bernstein's strategy is instead to double it, or more precisely to triple it. I quote the first of two more parallel portraits:

An Eye for an I: Emerson and Some "True" Poems of Robinson Jeffers, William Everson, Robert Penn Warren, and Adrienne Rich

Abstract: What I find most consistently moving about the act of a true poem is the way it puts the self at genuine risk. . . . To place oneself at genuine risk ... the poet must move to encounter an other, not more versions of the self. An other: God, nature, a beloved, an Idea, Abstract form, Language itself as a field, Chance, Death, Consciousness, what exists in the silence. Something not invented by the writer. Something the writer risks being defeated-or silenced-by. A poem is true if it can effect that encounter.

Words' Contexts, Contexts' Nouns: Zukofsky's Objectivist Quotations

Abstract: T he two halves of Louis Zukofsky's epic poem 'A4" seem radically divergent achievements: the publication of 'A4" 1-12 as a separate volume calls attention to a split, a departure from early techniques, in what Zukofsky always intended to be a unified long poem of twenty-four parts: "I've finished 12 'books,' / So to speak, / Of 24-" ('4"-12; 258).1 Yet somewhere between 1928 and 1974-the years between which Zukofsky composed the whole 'A"-clarity and obscurity made an odd union in Zukofsky's poetics. In 'A4" 1-12 he advocated an art embracing Bach's rules for the construction of a fugue whose parts, in their precision, "should behave like reasonable men / in an orderly discussion" ('4"-12; 127). As he progressed through his epic, however, he built an "orderly discussion" out of virtually unrecognizable syntaxes, fragments of linguistically unfamiliar combinations of words, such as "Enigma: tongue / gone scaling down sees apace, / clods deafmute let springs pray-" ('4"-23; 524). In the second half of 'A4", Zukofsky's commitment to words as objects seemed to move into new, uncharted territory. The late poetry, because it appears to depart from early methods, has not been tested against Zukofsky's