A collection of undelivered letters chronicles the intersecting stories of the survivors of a mysterious event that sends the world back to a technologically pre-industrial age.With its first letter set years into a new era, Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office chronologically works its way back to the abrupt, unexpected end of the modern world. Through the letters of the survivors, readers pick up clues into how that mysterious end came about and piece together how society broke down and began to reinvent itself. An epistolary mosaic emerges of a world in which distances have grown vastly greater, but the human need to communicate remains just as urgent as before. In this world, although most advanced technology is now useless or has been radically repurposed, many of humankind's most bedrock institutions and practices have not only survived, but - for good or ill - are stronger than ever: the public library, the cooperative farm, participatory democracy, out-group scapegoating, organized crime. Situated at the convergence of the experimental, epistolary and speculative genres, Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office is an inventive and disturbing yet ultimately hopeful vision of humanity's resilience in the aftermath of disaster.See more handwritten letters at http: //p-adlo.com/Nathan Poell is a librarian living in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two cats. This is his first novel.

This is a systematic study of the sociological debate on postmodernity in the Japanese context. The volume consists of a collection of 12 papers that explore the idea of postmodernity primarily from sociological perspectives, covering a wide range of domains including work, feminism, communication, science and technology, social stratification, fine arts and literature. The contributors come from diverse disciplines ranging from sociology and history to political science and linguistics. They include advocates of postmodern theories and postmodernist analyses of Japanese society, as well as critics who argue that a suitable revised theory of modernity is still an adequate framework for comparing Japan and the West. Others take the view that an intermediate position might be more productive; that a qualified or provisional version of postmodern can throw new light on issues traditionally neglected by social theory. While the postmodernity debate has been carried out chiefly in the context of European and American experiences, this book aims to pave the way for the postmodernity question to be explored in the non-western but highly industrialized setting of Japan, and brings forward a series of open-ended questions about the bias in the debate. Written by academics based in universities in Japan and Australia, the volume itself is postmodern in its internal diversity and multi-cultural orientation.

Shadowboxing the Apocalypse- the WW1 correspondence of Dr. Theo Hascall, 103rd Field Artillery, 26th Yankee Division contains fascinating letters sent home from the trenches in The Great War to East Providence (Riverside), RI. It also contains the text of all the letters sent by his wife Emma to Dr. Hascall in France during the Great War. It is a fascinating story of a young couple with three children (all under the age of 10) making sacrifices for their country, surviving the Great War, and weathering the Influenza pandemic in 1918. Their story is told in their own words with over 150 fully transcribed letters arranged by date. The book is divided into chapters corresponding to the major "sectors" the Yankee Division fought in during the war. Dr. Hascall "self censored" his letters, so many normally forbidden remarks are made. Dr. Hascall also carried a small camera, and many of his pictures are published in this book for the first time anywhere.

First published in 1992, this book represents the first major attempt to compile a bibliography of Derrida’s work and scholarship about his work. It attempts to be comprehensive rather than selective, listing primary and secondary works from the year of Derrida’s Master’s thesis in 1954 up until 1991, and is extensively annotated. It arranges under article type a huge number of works from scholars across numerous fields — reflecting the interdisciplinary and controversial nature of Deconstruction. The substantial introduction and annotations also make this bibliography, in part, a critical guide and as such will make a highly useful reference tool for those studying his philosophy.

Originally published in 1984. In Applied Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer provides an extraordinary introduction to the third, "applied" phase of grammatology, the "science of writing," outlined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. Ulmer looks to the later experimental works of Derrida (beginning with Glas and continuing through Truth in Painting and The Post Card). In these, he discovers a critical methodology radically different from the deconstruction for which Derrida is known. At the same time, he finds the source of a new pedagogy for all the humanities, one based on grammatology and appropriate to the era of audiovisual communications in which we live. Detractors of Derrida often accuse him of superficial wordplay and of using images and puns as nonfunctional subversions of academic conventions. Ulmer argues that there is, in fact, a fully developed use of homonyms in Derrida's style, which produces its own distinctive knowledge and insight. Derrida's experiments with images, moreover—his expansion of descriptions of everyday objects such as umbrellas, matchboxes, and post cards into cognitive models—serve to reveal a simplicity underlying intellectual discourse, which could be used to eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies. Comparing the stylistic innovations of Derrida with Jacques Lacan's use of puns and diagrams, with the German performance artist Joseph Beuys's demonstration of models, and with the "montage writing" of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Ulmer explores the possibility of deriving a postmodernist pedagogy from Derrida's texts. The first study to suggest the full potential of the program available in Derrida's writings, Applied Grammatology is also the first outline of a Derridean alternative to deconstructionism. With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.