The present volume assembles essays from a broad cultural and professional spectrum around the question of European cultural identity. The heterogeneity of the contributors - their differing points of departure and methods - attests to a tension in intellectual communities which today is more intense than ever. Europe's identity crisis is not merely an empirical matter. It reflects a far deeper, and far older, discursive crisis. The mandate of Europe's traditional intellectual institutions to preserve and police their own cultural heritage has proved incapable of evolving in a manner...

This compact, indispensable overview answers a vexed question: Why do so many works of modern and postmodern literature and art seem designed to appear 'strange', and how can they still cause pleasure in the beholder? To help overcome the initial barrier caused by this 'strangeness', the general reader is given an initial, non-technical description of the 'aesthetic of the strange' as it is experienced in the reading or viewing process. There follows a broad survey of modern and postmodern trends, illustrating their staggering variety and making plain the manifold methods and strategies...

Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field - N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others - this...

Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing seeks to ascertain the relationship obtaining between the specific form postmodernism assumes in a given culture, and the national narrative in which that culture traditionally recognizes itself. Theo D'haen provides a general introduction to the issue of "cultural identity and postmodern writing." Jos Joosten and Thomas Vaessens take a look at Dutch literature, and particular Dutch poetry, in relation to "postmodernism." Robert Haak and Andrea Kunne do the same with regard to, respectively, German and Austrian literature, while Roel Daamen turns to...

Virtual Geographies is the first detailed study to offer a working definition of cyberpunk within the postmodern force field. Cyberpunk emerges as a new generic cluster within science fiction, one that has spawned many offspring in such domains as film, music, and feminism. Its central features are its adherence to a version of virtual space and a deconstructivist, punk attitude towards (high) culture, modernity, the human body and technology, from computers to prosthetics. The main proponents of cyberpunk are analyzed in depth along with the virtual landscapes they have created - William...

This volume assembles critical essays on, and excerpts from, works of contemporary women writers in Britain. Its focus is the interaction of aesthetic play and ethical commitment in the fictional work of women writers whose interest in testing and transgressing textual boundaries is rooted in a specific awareness of a gendered multicultural reality. This position calls for a distinctly critical impetus of their writing involving the interaction of the political and the literary as expressed in innovative combinations of realist and postmodern techniques in works by A. S. Byatt, Maureen Duffy,...

This book traces the origins of the Postmodern eclectic grammar of linguistic collision back in the Surrealist poetics of ruins. Keeping in mind the images of lost direction in the big city as a central figure in the discussion of both the Modern and Postmodern aesthetics of displacement, Daniele starts comparing the epiphanic encounters of the Baudelairian flaneur in metropolitan Paris - in constant search for the traces of a lost symbolic order - with Breton's enigmatic pursuit of Nadja, the elusive sphinx in the crowd who moves in a mental territory of puzzling condensations and of...

The Holocaust is often said to be unrepresentable. Yet since the 1990s, a new generation of Jewish American writers have been returning to this history again and again, insisting on engaging with it in highly playful, comic, and "impious" ways. Focusing on the fiction of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander, this book suggests that this literature cannot simply be dismissed as insensitive or improper. It argues that these Jewish American authors engage with the Holocaust in ways that renew and ensure its significance for contemporary generations. These...