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The scientific discovery and mastery of electricity created as many important changes in modern society as did the invention of alphabetical writing in antiquity and movable type in the fifteenth century. It is more than a natural phenomenon that science has harnessed for human use; it is a central feature of the modern episteme. It has inspired writers and artists, propelled industry and innovation, and reshaped human social behaviour. Looking at a variety of topics including film, politics, and contemporary art, this volume explores the impact of electricity on knowledge, social practices, media, community life, and subjective experience.

The article describes hysterical pastiche as highlighted in the book Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. Whatever word one uses to describes the breakdown of the master discourses, it is clearly a question of a breakdown in the symbolic function, an inability of words to give form to the world. It is especially interesting that the man Janey pursues is the homosexual Genet and that she pursues him not for sexual reasons but in order to find out about writings. Such a territory may also recall the topography of postmodern writing, the flat collage of fragments that Frederic Jameson has termed pastiche and that he distinguishes from modernist parody as being a neutral practice, a practice that does not redound to the healthy linguistic normality of patriarchal discourse.

The article focuses on the linguistic control of the literary text of the book Wuthering Heights. The first three chapter of the narrative was devoted to the repetition of intrusion. The outsider, conventional in language as well as understanding, makes repeated efforts to force the reader's way to the penetralium. The exclusion of Lockwood from the Heights and the displacement of Lockwood as direct narrator of the novel, his excommunication from Wuthering Heights both as a banishment from its community and as a relegation to a position outside of communication, are already the common, if oblique, themes of the dreams themselves.

The article examines the implications of interpretative reading in women as highlighted in the works of author Maurice Blanchot. It is imperative to elaborate the function of the all-pervasive figure of the woman in Blanchot's texts since it is all-pervasiveness provides the oblique points of contact between the critical texts and the fictional text in question. In the critical works the figure of the woman helps to dramatize and manifest the paradoxes that haunt Blanchot's fundamental questions about literature. Encounters and relationships with the female sex are of crucial importance throughout the generic development of longer fictional texts.

The article explains the effort of philosopher Walter Benjamin to join allegory with dialectics. It is the promise that Benjamin's unorthodox matchmaking will contribute to a critical vocabulary for describing a commonplace and canonical genre in Latin America. The classic examples in Latin America are inevitably stories of star-crossed lovers who represent particular regions, races, parties, economic interests and the like. Their passion for conjugal and sexual union spills over to a sentimental readership in a move that hopes to win partisan minds along with hearts. Writers and readers evidently assumed a kind of allegory between love stories and national development, each apparently affecting the other and developing over time.

The article discusses a feminist literary criticism regarding the Bunyan paradigm. In The Valley of Humiliation Christian meets the archfiend Apollyon, who, since he is partly the image of Christian's own vainglory, is permitted to confront him. Looking at the mental landscape created by literary women of the nineteenth century, rough, windswept, active country where the experience of self-creation and self-confrontation peopled the meadows with the monstrous energies of ego, which the women wanted to enter and explore, unhindered by the mediating warrior who greened the Valley for them.

The article focuses on the gender representation in bourgeois society in pre-Marxist France. Because early discussions on the proletariat are a site of ideological manufacture, they reveal raw ideologemes often invisible when, once firmly in place, ideology naturalizes social construction as fact. The first French utopian socialist movement Saint-Simonians' seemingly feminist discourse served their efforts to render ideologically innocuous a discursively unstable and potentially dangerous social group. The consequences of the Saint-Simonian rhetorical work of gender for feminism are not entirely negative.

The article examines the depiction of the U.S. flag to mark a fantasy of erotic identification with someone present. It is a national fantasy, displayed as a spectacle of desire and a fantasy, apparently external to the official national frame of communion with an African American woman whose appearance personifies authenticity. Queer Nation's outspoken promotion of a national sexuality not only discloses that mainstream national identity touts a subliminal sexuality more official than a state flower or a national bird but also makes explicit how thoroughly the local experience of the body is framed by laws, policies and social customs regulating sexuality.

The article focuses on the contemporary national and mass cultural fixation on turning women into children and babies into persons through the media of photography and cinema as highlighted in the film Once Around. Once a transgressive revelation of a woman's sacred and shameful carnality, the pictorial display of pregnancy is an eroticized norm in U.S. public culture. To follow the condition of the mother was the slave child's legal and experiential condition in antebellum U.S. society. The maternal line of entailment without entitlement set up the horizon of the slave child's relation to embodiment.

The article examines maternal discourse and the romance of self-possession as highlighted in the book The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The code of liberal heroics produces the form of subjectivity demanded by a U.S. ideology of the self. The love referred to the consequence of consensus is heterosexual not maternal love. When the only valued, sanctioned and heroic form of selfhood is self-possession, then seeing the maternal figure as a representation of a liberal, national individualism risks ignoring the crucial findings of feminist psychoanalytic theory where maternity becomes the confrontation between the subject and the species.

The article discusses colonial mentality embodied but unrecognized in much of traditional Western literary criticism as highlighted in the book Colonial Harem by Malek Alloula. The book concentrates on images produced during the Golden Age of colonialism in Algeria from 1900 to 1930 to the scene of the Algerian revolution in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. The phantasm of the harem is only a transparent and convenient image behind which is hidden an even more sordid meaning, the key to which is colonization.

The article explains why feminists should avoid the uses and abuses of French discourse theories for feminist politics. Considering the uses of a theory of discourse for understanding social identities, the idea is that people's social identities are complexes of meanings, networks of interpretation. To have a social identity, to be a woman or a man is to live and to act under a set of descriptions. Social identities are exceedingly complex. They are knit from a plurality of different descriptions arising from a plurality of different signifying practices. A second use of a theory of discourse for feminist politics is in understanding the formation of social groups.

The article discusses the crisis faced by the African American creative intellectual. The period 1968 to 1970 meant the last fruition of a radical and pluralistic democracy with comparatively larger numbers of African American students admitted to the mainstream academy and agitation for the movements in African American studies and women's studies and their implications for a radically altered curriculum, especially in the humanities. Distracted by false or secondary issues, yielding apparently little resistance to the sound intrusion of market imperatives on the entire intellectual object.

The article discusses the consistent discourse of responsibility without equivocation and without contradiction to show that one is already partisan and it is to reveal that one's anxiety is for one's responsibility. One attempts to set the thought of responsibility to work in ways that are not purely academic. The secrecy of the secret does not disappear with revelation. The secret never allows itself to be captured or covered over by the relation to the other, by being with or by any form of social bond. One of the reasons for the secretiveness may be the impossibility of a fully justified position of accusation.