Clash of Identities By Dipak K. Gupta

I-879691-50-7
1998
hardback, 70 pp.
US $20.00

Clash of Identities presents Dipak K. Gupta's research on issues surrounding prediction in the social sciences, specifically, forecasting outbreaks of political violence. Honored as San Diego State University's eleventh Distinguished Graduate Research Lecturer, Gupta explores ethnic nationalism, globalization, and the dimensions of reason and intuition in the complex processes of political prediction in a variety of contexts. This book features Gupta's public lecture "Clash of Identities," his colloquium "Can We Predict Humanitarian Crises?", the article "An Early Warning about Political Forecasts: Oracle to Academics," and a comprehensive listing of the author's previous publications. Dipak K. Gupta is Professor in San Diego State University's School of Public Administration and Urban Studies, and Co-Director of the University's Institute for International Security and Conflict Resolution.

Perceiving and Telling: A Study of Iterative Discourse By Danièle Chatelain

ISBN 1-879691-52-3
1998
paper, 202 pp.
US $17.50

Perceiving and Telling: A Study of Iterative Discourse is a comparatist study exploring verbal conventions that create the illusion of time, as well as of theories about how these conventions have operated in the works of various authors. In her introduction, Danièle Chatelain says, "Central to current theories of narratology is a persistent sense of the separation of space and time. In Gerald Prince's A Dictionary of Narratology (1987), the categories of narratology appear to have reached canonical status, and the separation between time and space seems encoded in them. Typically, Prince defines "description," as "the representation of objects, beings, situations, or (nonpurposeful, nonvolitional) happenings in their spatial rather than temporal existence, their topological rather than chronological functioning, their simultaneity rather than succession" (19). "Narration," on the other hand, is "a discourse representing one or more events," that is, temporal phenomena (57). What we have, then, are sets of binary oppositions, which inform everything from structural distinctions, such as narration versus description, down to the fundamental binary histoire (story) and récit (narrative). In terms of story versus narrative, the separation of space and time is in a sense built into the very terms in which that distinction is traditionally formulated. In Prince's Dictionary, "story" is the content of the narrative; it is a succession of events "with an emphasis on chronology" (91). On the other hand, "narrative"is the recounting of this chronology; it is a "structuration," that is, a mental spatialization of this presumed flow of events. Underlying modern theory of narrative, in fact, is both a separation of time and space (story = chronology; narrative = structuration), and a sense of rivalry between these two dimensions. The result, it seems, is a valorization of the latter over the former." In her study, Chatelain seeks to show how these dimensions exist on a "spacetime continuum." The book is provided with a glossary of terms. Danièle Chatelain is Professor of French at the University of Redlands, California.

New SDSU Press Gateway Splash Designed by Dan Witz

Our main website gateway and main page now feature photography and art by Dan Witz; you can see more this East Coast artist's work here. Witz's work replaces the old gateway page by Crystal Alatorre:


Before Crystal Alatorre's gateway, SDSUPRESS featured the work of Becky Tillett--her work also graced the cover of pacificREVIEW, edited by Leon Lanzbom, poet and surfer-scribe extra-ordinaire.

22,000th and With a Bullet! Amazon.com and The Hurt Business

Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business has jumped to 22,000th on Amazon--not a bad first day for a day-old book!  Congratulations, Oliver!

Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business Collection is Now Available via Amazon.com

update here.

Perversions on Parade: Brazilian Literature of Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso by Steven F. Butterman

Perversions on Parade
Brazilian Literature of Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso
by Steven F. Butterman
Trade Paperback $25.00
AVAILABLE DIRECT ONLINE! $18.95 plus shipping via AMAZON.COM

This is the first book-length scholarly treatment in English of the Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso's work, some of which was written during Brazil's most recent dictatorship (1964-85). The author highlights Mattoso's themes of homosexuality, fetishism, and symbolic sadomasochism within a context of a comparative examination of transgressive literature in the Western canon (for example, the French poete maudit, such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine) with particular emphasis on Luso-Brazilian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Steven F. Butterman's PERVERSIONS ON PARADE, a respected 2005 issue from Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press, has recently been featured in the University of Miami newspaper, The Hurricane; click here for the original story.

Perversions on Parade is a 2005 Hyperbole Books Volume. Christened in 2004 as an imprint of San Diego State University Press, Hyperbole Books is dedicated to publishing cutting-edge, over-the-top experiments in critical theory, literary criticism and graphic narrative. Imagine some odd, bastard child of SEMIOTEXT[e], Taschen, and Fantagraphics Books raised in the dumpster behind Powells, and you begin to wide the wave of Hyperbole Books. Remember, "Buy the Hype."

Kathy Acker Critical Study Volume with Hyperbole Books, an imprint of SDSU Press

DEVOURING INSTITUTIONS

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker
Edited by Michael Hardin

ISBN: 1879691701 | 2005 | 272pp paperback*
illustrated: 2bw photos/map*

HYPERBOLE BOOKS, an imprint of
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ORDER NOW | ONLINE | $14.95 plus shipping
FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL HARDIN...

In April 1996, I organized a conference at which Kathy Acker was the keynote speaker,1 but could not imagine how to introduce such a complex writer and artist, and so I delegated that responsibility; now, however, I do not have such a luxury. I had met Kathy before, but it was while she was at this conference that she received the news that her biopsy had come back positive for breast cancer. Thus, when I heard on Monday, December 1, 1997 that she had died the day before, I felt a great loss. I was shocked-I knew she was a fighter and if anyone could beat cancer, she could-but at the same time, I had not heard from her since August. A few days later, I was informed of the news by the executor of her estate, so I asked how Kathy would have wanted to be remembered, thinking a memorial event in Houston might be nice, but he said, "keep her work alive." That was the germination for this collection, and I can happily state that since then, most of her work has come back into print, Grove released two new collections in fall 2002-The Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker and Rip-off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America-and NYU sponsored a conference on Kathy Acker in November, 2002. However, there remains a dearth of critical articles and books on her work, and her fiction is not taught as often as one might expect, given its relevance to contemporary literature and theory. To that end, Devouring Institutions is meant to be an introduction to Kathy Acker, with its essays being merely thirteen ways of looking at one of the most innovative, controversial, and difficult of American writers...

It is essential--particularly in these beige days through which the narratologically bland lead the narratologically bland--to explore and celebrate the brilliantly mad fictive possibility spaces Kathy Acker left behind. The essays in Devouring Institutions accomplish just that: together, they form a rich, important, multifaceted act of reminding about one of the most significant innovative writers of the last century.

Lance Olsen

Devouring Institutions is a welcome contribution to the study of Kathy Acker's oeuvre and influence. Hers was a subversive intellect that made an indelible mark on American literature of the 20th century.

Amy Scholder,
editor of Bodies of Work, Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective, and Essential Acker

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker is, to my knowledge, the first book-length manuscript that examines thoroughly, profoundly, and scholarly the Work of Kathy Acker. It will go a long way in introducing one of the most provocative, original, intellectual, and profound American writers of the late 20th century to the American reading public and the Academy. It will shatter the simplistic representation of Kathy Acker as a writer who simply wants to use profanity and pornography to shock the reader. Signifying the Western outlaw tradition of Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs; appropriating, plagiarizing, and rewriting the Western, canonical texts and art of Cervantes, Dickens, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Genet, Twain, Artaud, Rimbaud, Freud, and others; engaging, reverberating against, and conversing with the poststructuralist and postmodernist theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Cixous, and Irigaray; and exposing the violence and repression of the patriarchy and of capitalism in the late 20th century; Kathy Acker produces a body of literature that textualizes, undermines, and critiques the major social, political, sexual, and economic issues/forces confronting Western humanity as it enters the 21th century. Many of the essays in Devouring Institutions unearth and make available to the reader the artistry, the complex vision, the humanity, the beauty, and the political convictions of Kathy Acker and her Work. I think Devouring Institutions will not only establish Kathy Acker and her Work as a site of critical domain, but also will make an invaluable contribution to American scholarship.

Professor W. Lawrence Hogue
The University of Housto

A welcome and necessary addition to the Acker canon.

Diane Fare
the Literary Encyclopedia

Table of Contents

Kathy Acker: An Introduction
Michael Hardin

Writing between Madness and Paralysis

"The Madness Outside Gender: Travels with Don Quixote and Saint Foucault."
Carol Siegel
Washington State University-Vancouver

"Kathy Acker and Literary Madness: Erecting a Pornographic Shell."

Robert Mazzola

"The Paralyzing Tensions of Radical Art in a Postmodern World: Kathy Acker's Last Novels as Exploratory Fictions."

Svetlana Mintcheva
Arts Advocacy Project, National Coalition Against Censorship

Building the Body of Desires


"Re-Educating the Body: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and the Postmodern Body in My Mother: Demonology."

Terry Engebretsen
Idaho State University

"Too Much Is Never Enough: A Kaleidoscopic Approach to the Work of Kathy Acker."

Gayle Fornataro
Long Beach State University

"The Lay of the Land: Piracy and the Iterant Body in Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates."

Sheri Weinstein
SUNY-Buffalo

"Between Theory and Autobiography: Negotiating Desire, Sex, and Love in the Work of Kathy Acker."

Michael Hardin
Bloomsburg University

Attacking Language

"Residues or Revolutions of the Language of Acker and Artaud."

Carla Harryman
Wayne State University

"Words Hurt! Acker's Appropriation of Myth in Don Quixote."

Jan Corbett
Delaware Valley College

"Kathy Acker's Radical Performance Writing in Eurydice in the Underworld and Other Texts."

Catherine Rock
University of Alberta

Post-Plagiarism

"Beyond Appropriation: Pussy, King of the Pirates and a Feminist Critique of Intellectual Property."

Caren Irr
Brandeis University

"Voice, Politics, Copyright."
Nicole CooleyQueens College

"Scavenging the E-Wreck: Kathy Acker, the Internet, and Artis Electronica."

Trevor Dodge
Idaho State University.

Kathy Acker
A Primary and Secondary Bibliography

Four Pages from an Interview with Oliver Mayer from Hyperbole Books's THE HURT BUSINESS