There is also another chapter on the posthumanism in the collection: Glitch Poetics: The Posthumanities of Error by Nathan Jones.
Richard Holeton’s gleefully, not to say Gaudi-ly, illustrated glidepath through the remnants of language that trail beyond the (littoral, literal) “postmodern” like the tail of a forlorn freeform comix comet, manage—as the Oulipo poet Michelle Grangaud might have said in her own Formes de l’anagramme à faire plusieurs fois des Temps rondo, in an eschatological imagetext mashup of demon storm troops, pert rodents, and skidrow resident poets, porn purveyors, and sperm donors via Flickr borrowings, Wiki burrowings, and whole tons of homebrew images bluesily rendered ala twerk.
(Source: Vassar Review introduction)
Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.
On Amy Elias’s view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott’s early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.
On posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.
Sven Philipp on Cosmopolis and what seems to be a new stage in the critical reception of DeLillo.
In the triad of Verso pamphlets on 9/11, Nick Spencer sees a convergence of postmodern critique (against the capitalist culture of postmodernity).
Cary Wolfe reviews Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order.
Early on in The New Ecological Order, French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and the danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is that it can call itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought… At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal (xx).
As we shall see, for Ferry – a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not Cartesian tradition – this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism.
Steffen Hantke presents an archeology of Don DeLillo’s Underworld.
(Source: ebr)
First, IN.S.OMNIA operates from the premise that the domain of literature as such is no longer in synch with cultural experience in contemporary America. Rather than “look for ‘the next big thing’ in literature,” IN.S.OMNIA asks, “What if the next big thing already surrounds us, embedded in small gestures we perform every day? What if the next big thing is the realization that we have changed the way we use culture - remapping, rewiring, renetworking the same old pool of elements in new ways, adding to them furtive scribbles, seeking pleasures without naming them?