Science fiction and the cultural logic of early post postmodernism

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Notes

1. Alexandra Jacobs, an editor at the New York Observer who was a passenger on the JetBlue flight, used the term “post postmodern” when she described her ordeal to CNN's Anderson Cooper: “We couldn't believe the irony that we might be watching our own demise on television. It just seemed a bit post postmodern, if you will.”

2. In her foreword to The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson Secret Agents, Private 1, Robin Held explains her references to the artist's name. I follow the form Held explains. Held says, “I refer to the artist as Lynn Hershman Leeson throughout my essay, although visual art and film audiences might know her best as Lynn Hershman. She added ‘Leeson’ to her name following her 1991 marriage to George Leeson, and this is how her film credits have subsequently appeared; however her art works are still often exhibited under the name Lynn Hershman” (Held 2005: xviii).

3. I define “textism” as “a discriminatory evaluation system in which all literature relegated to a so-called subliterary genre, regardless of its individual merits, is automatically defined as inferior, separate, and unequal” (Barr 2004: 430).

4. See Marleen S. Barr, “Bush's Missile Shield is a Science Fiction Fantasy,” Newsday, December 2, 2001; “American Science Fiction; or ‘What Happened to the Flying Cars?’: Science Fiction/Millennia/Culture,” in Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003, pp. ix–xxi; and “Katrina Storms the Reality Studio: Seeing the Hurricane with a Science Fiction Eye,” Stanford University Committee on Black Performing Arts Black Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2006: 9, 13. For a discussion of my point about the analogy between Bush's missile shield proposal and science fiction, see Eric Mason, “Remediating the Magic Kingdom: Notes Toward a Poetics of Technology,” Currents in Electronic Literacy, Fall 2004: 8, http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall04/mason.html

5. See “Beijing's First SMS Novel to Be Made into Film,” China Daily, September 9, 2004, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-09/20/content_376042.htm. The article explains that He Xingnian's work is “a 4,200-character, 60-chapter novel that has been sent out to cellphone subscribers in short installments.” In addition, the novel “is being made into a film that will also be transmitted to cellphones and on the Internet.”

6. The first comprehensive United States survey of Lynn Hershman Leeson's work, organized by the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, is called Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson (November 5, 2005–February 5, 2006).