SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
The Passing of Postmodernism
Examines the increasingly prevalent assumption that postmodernism is over and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics.
Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism
Explores the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonnegut’s work.
This Is a Picture and Not the World
Uses satirical parodies of screenplays and political blogs to reveal the cracks in our post-9/11 American psyche.
Roll Over Adorno
Moves from Beethoven to Buffy to examine the blurred nexus of elite and popular culture in the twenty-first century.
Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture
Explores the role and function of the autopsy in Western culture, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lecture to The X-Files and CSI.
Post-Marxist Theory
An introduction to the philosophical, economic, historical, feminist, and cultural versions of post-Marxist theory.
TechnoLogics
Uses literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to explore the emerging logic of the posthuman.
What We Want Is Free
Examines the way recent artists have incorporated concepts of generosity into their work.
Musing the Mosaic
Examines Sukenick's role in reshaping the American literary tradition.
From Girl to Woman
Examines the crucial role that coming-of-age narratives have played in American feminism.
Memory's Orbit
Memoir meets cultural criticism in this examination of American popular culture at the end of the century.
Performing Whiteness
Explores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.
Feast and Folly
Treats French cuisine as a "fine art," offering both historical background as well as a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste.
Home
A history professor experiences disturbing parallels between the furor over hiring decisions and an alleged case of sexual harassment on his own campus, and the harassment of an anarchist commune on south Puget Sound in 1902.
After the Orgy
Explores the post-Enlightenment obsession with apocalyptic endings.
The Visionary Moment
Explores and critiques the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment as a convention in twentieth-century American fiction, from the standpoint of postmodernism.
Mail-Orders
Explores contemporary uses of letters and letter writing—including electronic mail—in literature, film, and art.
Productive Postmodernism
Investigates a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture to address the role of history in postmodern cultural productions.
Rewriting
Examines the tendency of post-World War II writers to rewrite earlier narratives by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and others.
Reading Simulacra
Traces the ways in which our culture has increasingly become a culture of simulations, and offers strategies for discerning meaning in a world where the difference between what is real and what is simulated has collapsed.
Beautiful Chaos
Explores the way chaos theory is incorporated in the work of such writers as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Don DeLillo, and Michael Crichton.
Postmodern Journeys
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this fast-paced ride through the postmodern landscape of American popular culture explores how our responses to headline events and popular films help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us.
Popular Modernity in America
Examines a wide variety of cultural and technological phenomena that have helped shape American popular culture over the last 150 years.
Many Pretty Toys
When Nixon orders the bombing of Cambodia, a university erupts in protest, irrevocably altering the lives of students and faculty, and disrupting the process of storytelling itself.
Romantic Desire in (Post)modern Art and Philosophy
An erudite and wide-ranging discussion of postmodernism and romanticism in twentieth-century art and philosophy.
Counterpleasures
Takes up a series of literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from Christian saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to contemporary s/m practices.
Masocriticism
Provocative, inventive, and at times outrageous essays on literary theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism.
Modernity's Pretenses
Undermines modernity's authority through a cultural and historical examination of texts and thinkers from the Enlightenment to post-Stalinist Europe.
Passport to Hollywood
Examines popular films made in Hollywood by European directors, offering a fresh take on the much-debated issue of the "great divide" between modernism and mass culture.
The Transparency of Spectacle
Considers the ephemeral nature of the cinematic experience as we now apprehend it, and examines the ways in which technological advances in film and moving image production have changed this experience over the course of the last thirty-odd years.
Labyrinths of the Mind
Applies postmodern theory to the working assumptions and consequent practices of therapy in various disciplines, from clinical psychology to schooling.
Speeding to the Millennium
Intersperses headline events, popular film, postmodern theory, and fictional vignettes in order to capture the elusive cultural imaginary of our twentieth-century fin de siecle.
From Hegel to Madonna
Moves from the discourses of dialectical negation to cultural-populist affirmation--that is, from Hegel to Madonna Studies--in order to envision a mode of critique that can persuasively describe and explain the cultural contradictions of late capitalism.
Bodies at Risk
Taking a post-psychoanalytic, queer-theoretical approach, this book links philosophical and aesthetic issues in two distinct periods through the examination of a variety of imaginative texts, from canonical poetry and fiction to avant-garde music and film.
Other Germanies
Explores notions of personal and cultural identity, and offers an introduction to the work of women in literature, film, dance, and visual art in Germany.
Bookend
Enacts and evokes the changes and creative possibilities emerging from contemporary literary technologies (electronic media).
Dali and Postmodernism
Demonstrates that Dali's Surrealism anticipates postmodern tactics, and inaugurates "New Dali Studies" by offering an original interpretation of his relationship with the Surrealist canon.
Bodily Discursions
This collection of feminist essays from a variety of disciplines explores the idea of the body as a site for the production of political ideologies.
Cross-Addressing
Using a "cultural studies" approach to the question of what constitutes literary study at the end of the twentieth century, the contributors address identity politics in specific cultural instances.
Posts
An innovative study of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy, relating the ethical to the problematic of the text as a post or a sending in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Kristeva, and Foucault, and phrasing the ethical as the questions of how to read and write after.
Postmodernism - Local Effects, Global Flows
Offers readable case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, showing disorganization as characteristic of postmodern times.
Fire and Roses
Interprets postmodernity in relation to the body--the "somatological a priori," and applies current critical theory to issues of gender, popular culture fashion, and magic, as well as the Western philosophical/theological tradition.
Fear, Truth, Writing
This book describes and examines the fear of exposure one faces when creating for cultural consumption. Examining the work of Cixous, Foucault, Irigaray, Spinoza, Hegel, Hakim Bey, Heidegger, Kathy Acker, ...
Spectacular Vernaculars
Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.
Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes
This book explores the consequences of postmodern theory and answers the question, "What did postmodern theory begin?"
Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression
This book offers a radical, "Third World" approach to current debates on canon revision, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and reforms in education and culture.
It Looks At You
This is a study of the "returned gaze" from the cinema screen, demonstrating that the films that we watch watch us, guide us, control our gaze, and enforce societal codes.
Hauntings
This book is about the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.
Critifiction
Examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time.