Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In "Special Delivery," Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire.
Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," Roland Barthes's" A Lover's Discourse," and Jacques Derrida's "The Post Card." She...

Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds,...

In this outstanding collection of essays, contributed by some of America's leading feminist writers, the current terrain of American feminism is charted as never before. Covering a broad range of subjects and a diversity of approaches, this volume demonstrates just how far American feminism has come in developing distinctive and sophisticated strategies for combining theory and practice.

While many of the writers represented have made their careers within the academy, their interests are never exclusively academic. Indeed, at the heart of this book lies a broad concern with the...