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.
Musing the Mosaic
Examines Sukenick's role in reshaping the American literary tradition.
Memory's Orbit
Memoir meets cultural criticism in this examination of American popular culture at the end of the century.
From Girl to Woman
Examines the crucial role that coming-of-age narratives have played in American feminism.
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.