Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 08:29:38 +0000
From: PMC <pmc@JEFFERSON.VILLAGE.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: PMC Call for Peer Reviewers
PMC: Essays Currently Available for Peer Review
Self-nominated peer-reviewers regularly participate in the
editorial process of _Postmodern Culture_. All submissions
distributed for review have been screened by the editors and will
receive two other readings from members of the journal's
permanent editorial board; _Postmodern Culture_ preserves the
anonymity of both authors and reviewers in this process, but the
comments of reviewers will be forwarded to the author.
If you would like to review one of the submissions described
below, and if you think you can complete that review within two
weeks of receiving the essay, please send a note to the editors at
pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu outlining your qualifications
as a reviewer of the work in question (experience in the subject
area, publications, interest), identifying the MS by number as
listed below, and specifying the manner in which you would like
to receive the essay (electronic mail, World-Wide Web, or hard
copy). We will select one self-nominated reviewer for each of the works
listed below, and we will notify reviewers within two weeks.
Information gathered during this process about potential reviewers
will be kept on file at PMC for future reference, and may be made
available for online searching by PMC subscribers seeking
expertise in a particular field. Please note: members of the
journal's permanent editorial board should not nominate themselves
in response to this call.
Manuscripts for review:
MS #1: Drawing on Saul Friedlander's essay "Reflections of
Nazism, an Essay on Kitsch and Death," this essay
proposes a reading of the media coverage of the
Oklahoma City bombing. The author argues that
underlying the ostensibly neutral description offered
by the media is a narrative that both condemns and
invests the spectacle of rightist heroism. The author
then examines the structure of heroic agency itself
through a reading of Georges Bataille's essay "The
Psychological Structure of Fascism."
MS #2: An analysis of styles of honor in Malcolm X and Miles
Davis. The author argues that by positioning
themselves as archetypal black men, X and Davis became
champions of the black male-delineated worlds of black
religion and black music, spheres in which black
mastery privileged an ethic of "cool." X's and Davis's
investments in codes of honor, in "coolness," the
author suggests, not only offered a context for their
cultural successes, but also provided a basis for the
construction of a re-energized and progressive African-
American socio-political movement. References include
Eldridge Cleaver, bell hooks, Perry Imani, Greg Tate,
and Cornel West.
MS #3: Focusing in particular on the documentary _Blood in the
Face_, this paper explores some of the primary debates
in semiotics as they pertain to documentary film. The
author argues that documentary film, as a genre without
a code who referent is reality as such, provides a rich
arena for understanding the contradictions in both sign
theory and ideology. References include Bazin,
Barthes, Metz, Pasolini, Heath, Bahktin, and Volosinov.
MS #4: A response to Ron Silliman's essay "Wild Form," this
article asks, "Why does a poet write a statement of
poetics?" Noting that Silliman is indebted to a
Kerouac letter for the title of his essay, this paper
suggests that both Silliman and Kerouac see form as a
vehicle for liberation. Whereas Kerouac views this
liberation as essentially aesthetic, however, Silliman
--as demonstrated in his poem _Tjanting_-- regards it
as political and social. References include David Levi
Strauss and Nils Ya.
MS #5: An analysis of the relevance of sampling in art to
postmodern art theory, this article offers close
readings of the use of sampling in Charles Bernstein,
Laurie Anderson, and Beck. The author proposes that
the concerns and practices of these artists blur the
boundaries between high and low culture, and that the
diversity their work offers invites a panoptic and
dialectic examination of artistic sampling.
References include Mark Dery, Simon Frith, Russell
Potter, and Susan Schultz.
MS #6: An examination of the contemporary "superfluity" of
poetry, this essay argues that because poetry has been
confined to "writing," as such, it has been prevented
from questioning its own nature and limits. This
essay is thus a "paratactic rumination on poetry and
parataxis. It examines the residual surplus of
insufficiency that poetry accumulates in the idle
melancholy of its endless beginnings." Translated from
Russian.
MS #7: An interrogation of postmodern identities and Versace's
%culto del corpo%. Supplemented by fashion photographs
from Versace's menswear catalogues and quotes from the
couturiere, this essay explores the ways in which the
fashion system has evolved as a public situs for the
exploitation and extrusion of the ambivalences produced
by the social self, and how fashion photography, in
particular, is aimed at postmodern notions of
decentered subjectivity. References include Roland
Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein, Moe Meyer, Laura Mulvey,
Camille Paglia, and Gregory Woods.
MS #8: An inquiry into the celebrity status of intellectuals
within the academy, this essay begins by exploring
complaints about the so-called academic star system,
and then attempts to fit this system into a more
general problematic of upward mobility narratives.
References include Cary Nelson, Sharon O'Dair, David
Shumway, and Jennifer Wicke.
MS #9: A dialogic enactment of a conversation with the author,
Bataille, Haraway, and Arnold Schwarzenager, this piece
explores the relationship among animals, humans, and
machines.
MS #10: This essay reviews the work of Peter Holbrook, a
photorealist painter. The author argues that
Holbrook's landscape paintings are in tune with the
late twentieth-century American aesthetic culture which
mingles modern and postmodern sensibilities: Holbrook's
landscapes relate to time as well as space, his
photographs blend the modern fetish of precision to the
postmodern aesthetics of presence/absence, and his gaze
is driven both by the modern desire to command and the
postmodern tendency towards ambivalence. References
include Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault.
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