• Electronic Journals
• Electronic Books
• Electronic Text Centers
• Example

Electronic Texts

Electronic Journals

The most comprehensive listing of electronic serials to date is maintained by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an organization aligned with the Big Ten universities. In May, 1995, there were over 800 electronic journals listed.

At the system prompt type GOPHER GOPHER.CIC.NET R

Choose option 4, Electronic Serials, then choose option 2.

You may search alphabetically by title or display the complete list.

It is important to note that CIC is maintaining an archive, which means that (1) many of the journals listed are no longer active, and (2) the most recent issues of the active journals may not be listed. It would always be wise to find the original source of the journal and send a query regarding publication schedule.

The best way to keep up with an ejournal of interest is to place your name on the distribution list, or "subscribe", much as you would for an Internet discussion list. A list of ejournals with subscription information has been announced as being available this summer, and will be posted on KCINFO in the Library section.

Ejournals today cover a wide area of subjects, with the academically oriented ones by far the best developed and the most consistent. The Table of Contents of a recent issue of the ejournal Postmodern Culture is appended for examination.

Please use the exercise attached for leads to other listings of ejournals and ebooks. See also Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet", 2nd ed., pages 405406.

An issue surrounding ejournals as well as all etexts is readability for ease of preparation and transmission they are usually sent in ASCII format with no capability for graphics and little capability for color and highlighting. Many critics of the movement toward electronic information sources and away from paper point to this as a major detriment

to the advancement of the electronic dissemination of information. Nevertheless the problem is not technically unresolvable. OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) has developed a Windowsbased interface for the journals it is now distributing. Called GUIDON, this interface enables color, a variety of type faces, highlighting, user control over the "reading surface", and enlargement ("zooming") ofthe text. Another tool, Netscape, is completely graphics based and does an excellent job of displaying both text and graphics, in a Windowsbased interface. The hypertextual aspect of Netscape also adds another dimension really many dimensions to both the author's creation of the text and to the user's reception of the text.

Both techniques have limits and both are in early stages of development, but both prove that readability issues have technical solutions.

Many ejournals are now indexed in "authoritative" academic indices the journal Postmodern Culture, for example, is in the MLA index available on CD-ROM in the Infolab in the Kenyon library. Libraries have begun considering listing them in their catalogs as well, but many are waiting for the technology which will enable the user to not only identify the journal, but also ask to see the issues on the same terminal.

Ejournals will have an interesting future in academe. Steve Harnad, Editor of the ejournal Psycoloquy, suggested that the slow process of paper publication has been detrimental to scholarship. He stated in his paper "What Scholars Want and Need From Electronic Journals" that ejournals offer

"(1) rapid, expert peerreview, (2) rapid copyediting, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive."

Electronic Books

Ebooks are still in development. Limitations in terms of copyright, permissions, and the publishing industry's careful, concerned approach to the possibility of widespread pirating of protected texts, have all led to little movement toward the direction of the "entire Library of Congress in the palm of your hand".

The largely volunteer Gutenberg project should not be slighted, though, its efforts have yielded rich results Moby Dick, Les Miserables (in English), The Federalist Papers. Yet the academic world is concerned that the controls necessary to warrant use are missing there is seldom reference to the edition used, and no guarantee that the inputter did not make errors in transferring paper to text. The goal of the project is to provide something for the reader, not the researcher.

(On the subject of reliability, see the section Electronic Text Centers below.)

Interesting technologically, and in development on several levels, are etexts written in the hypertext format, and permitting links to other sources on the Internet. The electronic version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica permits the user to jump from an article on the Vatican toimages of the recent exhibit at the Library of Congress of materials from the Vatican Library. Perhaps following this concept a biographical dictionary of Nineteenth Century American authors could have links to representative works? This "expanded book" concept, suggested Laura Fillmore at the Internet 93 conference in December, 1993, may lead to a new category of jobs in publishing, that of the "link editor".

An interesting question is whether the future of the ebook means the end of the book in paper. Todd J. B. Blayone, Editor of the bulletin ComputerAssisted Research Forum (vol. 2 no. 1) has suggested the terms of the debate as

In defense of the paper book:

Usability

Portability

Readability

Accessibility

Bibliophilia

For the electronic book:

Less expensive production process

Less time needed to get text from the author to the reader

No trees destroyed

Electonic versions offer new ways to author, access, augment,

and manipulate texts

To this might be added suggestions that group authorship and collaboration are made easier.

Please use the exercise attached for listings of ebooks. See also Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet", 2nd ed., pages 432435.

Electronic Text Centers

A number of projects seek to find ways to distribute texts electronically to the academic world in ways that preserve the integrity of the work (for example an author's early draft, with corrections) and augment its use (for example, in a hypertext application references to names in Ulysses may be highlighted, and the reader enabled to "jump" to an explanation of the person, his role in the book, and other sections in which the name appears.)

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia is working on the works of Immanuel Kant, the Global Jewish Database, Greek and Latin texts and images, and a hypertext edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

The Center For Electronic Texts in the Humanities, established jointly by Princeton University and Rutgers University in 1991, is inventorying electronic texts (the Inventory of MachineReadable Texts in the Humanities), developing works that may be placed onthe Internet, and providing educational programs to teach the techniques for text encoding.

For further information on these and other efforts please consult George P. Landow and Paul Delaney "The Digital Word: TextBased Computing in the Humanities", The MIT Press, 1993. (A copy is owned by the Kenyon library call number PN98 E4 D54 1993.) Another excellent and uptodate source is the March 1994 issue of Information Technology and Libraries. This special issue is dedicated to the question "Electronic Texts: Where Next?" and is also owned by the

library. See both works for summaries of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and TEI (the Text Encoding Initiative).

Example

POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE

P RNCU REPO ODER E P O S T M O D E R N

P TMOD RNCU U EP S ODER ULTU E C U L T U R E

P RNCU UR OS ODER ULTURE

P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER ULTU E an electronic journal

P TMODERNCU UREPOS ODER E of interdisciplinary

POSTMODERNCULTUREPOSTMODERNCULTURE criticism

Volume 4, Number 1 (september, 1993) ISSN: 10531920

Editors: Eyal Amiran, Issue Editor

John Unsworth

Review Editor: Jim English

List Manager: Chris Barrett

Editorial Assistant: Jonathan Beasley

Editorial Board:

Kathy Acker Chimalum Nwankwo

Sharon Bassett Patrick O'Donnell

Michael Berube Elaine Orr

Marc Chenetier Marjorie Perloff

Greg Dawes David Porush

R. Serge Denisoff Mark Poster

Robert Detweiler Carl Raschke

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mike Reynolds

Joe Gomez Avital Ronell

Robert Hodge Andrew Ross

bell hooks Jorge Ruffinelli

E. Ann Kaplan Susan M. Schultz

Barbara KirshenblattGimblett William Spanos

Arthur Kroker Tony Stewart

Neil Larsen Gary Lee Stonum

Jerome J. McGann Chris Straayer

Stuart Moulthrop Paul Trembath

Larysa Mykyta Greg Ulmer

Phil Novak

CONTENTS

AUTHOR & TITLE FN FT

Masthead, Contents, and CONTENTS.993

Instructions for retrieving files

Peter Hitchcock, "'It Dread Inna Inglan': HITCHCOC.993

Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub

Identity"

Stephanie Hammer, "On the Bull's Horn with HAMMER.993

Peter Handke: Debates, Failures, Essays,

and a Postmodern Livre de Moi"

Eugene W. Holland, "A Schizoanalytic Reading HOLLAND.993

of Baudelaire: The Modernist as

Postmodernist"

Elizabeth Fay, "Mapplethorpe's Art: Playing FAY.993

with the Byronic Postmodern"

George Bradley, "Another Autumn Refrain" and BRADLEY.993

"Two Thirds of a Second at the Center of

the Universe"

Lynda Hart, "That was Then: This is Now: HART.993

Exchanging the Phallus"

Martin Rosenberg, "Dynamic and Thermodynamic ROSENBER.993

Tropes of the Subject in Freud and in

Deleuze and Guattari"

POPULAR CULTURE COLUMN:

Steven Shaviro, "If I Only Had a Brain" POPCULT.993

REVIEWS:

Mark Fenster, "Authorizing Memory, Remembering

Authority." A Review of Michael Schudson's

_Watergate in American Memory: How We

Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the

Past_, and Barbie Zelizer's _Covering the

Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media,

and the Shaping of Collective Memory_. REVIEW1.993

Rita Barnard, "`Imagining the Unimaginable':

J.M. Coetzee, History, and Autobiography."

A Review of David Attwell's _J.M. Coetzee:

South Africa and the Politics of Writing_,

and J.M. Coetzee, _Doubling the Point:

Essays and Interviews_, ed. David Attwell. REVIEW2.993

Heesok Chang, "Postmodern Communities: the

Politics of Oscillation." A Review of

Gianni Vattimo's _The Transparent Society_

and Giorgio Agamben, _The Coming

Community_. REVIEW3.993

J.L. Lemke, "Practice, Politique, Postmodernism."

A review of Pierre Bourdieu and Lois J.D.

Wacquant's _An Invitation to Reflexive

Sociology_. REVIEW4.993

John McGowan, "Postmodernist Purity." A review

of Craig Owens's _Beyond Recognition:

Representation, Power, and Culture_.

Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne

Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. REVIEW5.993

SPECIAL MUSIC CLUSTER

Andrew Herman, "Fear of Music." A review of

Andrew Goodwin's _Dancing in the

Distraction Factory: Music Televison and

Popular Culture_. REVIEW6.993

Marc Perlman, "Idioculture: DeMassifying the

Popular Music Audience." A review of

Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles

Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project's

_My Music_. Foreword by George Lipsitz. REVIEW7.993

Timothy D. Taylor, "The Sound of the

AvantGarde." A review of Douglas Kahn

and Gregory Whitehead, eds., _The Wireless

Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the

AvantGarde_. REVIEW8.993

LETTERS:

Paul Miers, on Kip Canfield LETTERS.993

NOTICES:

Announcements and Advertisements NOTICES.993

ABSTRACTS

Peter Hitchcock, "'It Dread Inna Inglan': Linton Kwesi Johnson,

Dread, and Dub Identity"

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the production of

cultural voice in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ),

the African/Caribbean/European dub poet. It suggests that

the doubledisplacement of an AfricanCaribbean Black living

in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double

indemnitymaking and history. But what cultural logic

obtains in the construction/reconstruction of subjectivity as

subaltern, the articulation of the margin, the trace, the

veve, that still allows a trenchant sense of history, of the

need to make history? Can we still conceive of subjects

that make history, have a history to make, remake at a

cocophanous rendezvous of victory? To understand why this

notion is not a mystery (the History, for instance, of

imperialist certitude) but a problematic, one must

understand what makes this history: one must come to terms

with the history of the voice, what Kamus Braithwaite calls

the "invitation and challenge" or what Edouard Glissant

defines as "literature" and "oraliture" (the fragmented and

therefore shared histories and voices of peoples). One can

read this history as an introduction in LKJ's sonorous beat,

and one can see this history in a dissidence of voice, in

all its synesthesia and dislocation. PH

Stephanie Hammer, "On the Bull's Horn with Peter Handke: Debates,

Failures, Essays, and a Postmodern Livre de Moi"

ABSTRACT: This essay discusses Handke's critical

reception as it pertains to the postmodern and "reads"

Handke's recent essay series (the VERSUCHE) against a

variety of concerns: desire, castration, subjectivity, and

the resonance of fatheressayist Michel de Montaigne.

Handke's essays whittle away at the authority of traditional

male subjectivity in graphic ways, as though performing a

process of aesthetic selfcastration in payment of a new,

legitimized subjectivity. To paraphrase Michel Leiris,

Handke's autobiographical doubles not only expose themselves

to the bull's horn, they allow themselves to be gored; this

reverse matadorian spectacle is at once the performance to

which we are constantly invited and the radical cure which

we might also enact upon ourselves. SH

Eugene W. Holland, "A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The

Modernist as Postmodernist"

ABSTRACT: This schizoanalytic reading of Baudelaire

draws on psychoanalytic, rhetorical, and

historicalmaterialist interpretations in order to show that

the historical momentum that carried Baudelaire out of

romanticism into modernism also propelled him "beyond"

modernism into a stance we recognize today as postmodern.

Connecting Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "decoding" with

the prevalence of metonymy over metaphor (in linguistic,

rhetorical, and psychoanalytic terms [Jakobson, Barbara

Johnson, and Lacan, respectively]) enables us to read the

sonnet "Beauty" as a subversion of the metaphoric poetics of

"Correspondences"a subversion that continues into the

"Parisian Tableaus" section of _The Flowers of Evil_, and

culminates in the split stance of the narrator in the prose

poem collection. This trajectory is fueled by Baudelaire's

shock and dismay at the founding of a Second Empire on the

ruins of the Second Republic. While his modernism emerges

in the ability to distance himself serenely from former

romanticidealistic selves, his postmodernism lies in the

recognition that the victims of Second Empire society he

contemplates and depicts from afar are actually splitoff

versions of former selves, with which he cannot help but

identify. EWH

Elizabeth Fay, "Mapplethorpe's Art: Playing With the Byronic

Postmodern"

ABSTRACT: There exist trenchant connections between

Byron's romantic creation of himself as a literary figure,

and Mapplethorpe's reinterpretation of the Byronic mode

towards a postmodern creation of possible selves. The

verbal and photographic "languages" employed by both artists

focus on issues that allow for a comparative analysis of

"staging," and what is termed here "the byronic postmodern."

Within this focus, the artistic meaning of "staging" applies

to the artistic "self" in ways that seduce the viewer into a

consuming appreciator of the artist's seemingly unlabored

work. It also entails a particular form of the visual

contract normatively understood to exist between artist and

viewer. Byronic artists are equipped to understand the

seductively teasing nature of this contract because they

base their art on the bodily interplay made permissible

between heteroand homosexual worlds by costuming and role

playing. EF

Lynda Hart, "That Was Then: This Is Now: Exchanging the Phallus"

ABSTRACT: The concept of masochism has had to be

rethought in light of recent developments in psychoanalysis,

feminism, and gay and lesbian studies. Bersani and others,

for example, have suggested that submission may be sexually

emancipatory for men, thus making it a privileged rather

than an oppressed position; women, meanwhile, continue to be

considered naturally rather than performatively masochistic,

and thus unable to benefit from masochism as a strategy.

Such conceptualizations of the reality and/or theatricality

of masochism and pornography still require lesbianism to be

a negative ontology. The lesbian phallus, however,

instigates a representational crisis by making no reference

to the Real of the penis; it does not signify the

persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification.

Rather, the lesbian phallus is the property of she who has

given up what no one has. [Ed.]

Martin Rosenberg, "Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the

Subject in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari"

ABSTRACT: The descriptions of human consciousness in

Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely

in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover

the "ground" for that opposition by examining the role

played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these

theorists' representations of subjectivity. We will need to

notice the historical differences in the ideological use of

these tropes. Yet, even contemporary theories of tropes

have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to

model how tropes work. Drawing on Ilya Prigogine's

confrontation with the rhetoricity governing a "clash of

doctrines" between timereversible (dynamic) and

timeirreversible (thermodynamic) assumptions underlying

investigations in the physical sciences, we will examine

first the role of oppositional tropes from physics in

theories of tropes. Second, we will observe the role that

these tropes play in representing the subject: in Freud's

"The Dreamwork," in Laplanche and Pontalis' account of

Freud's subjectsystems, and in Stallybrass and White's

account of the unconscious as the site of the carnivalesque.

We will then show how Deleuze and Guattari's representations

of the subject in terms of the nomad and the rhizome, simply

invert Freud's valorizing of the dynamic laws controlling

thermodynamic processes, arguing instead for the celebration

of the contingent and the indeterminate. In a telling

passage on chess and Go as game theories of war in which

chess becomes the discourse of %physis%, while Go becomes

the discourse of %nomos%, Deleuze and Guattari seek to hide

their own claims for a timeirreversible model of cultural

resistance "grounded" in natural laws of a different sort

than those justifying the rules of domination governing

subjectivity and society since the Industrial

Revolution. MER

Exercise: