Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic ed. by Tobin Siebers (review)

Book Reviews209 schemes for literacy software, covers only those developed for writing and literature classes, ignoring the developments over the past few years that have grown out of projects with adult literacy learners. The readers of this journal will find many of the essays provocative, especially if they are newcomers to the field of computers and writing. William Goodrich Jones details how little the research habits of traditional scholars have been influenced by technology, though one suspects this situation has already changed substantially since he wrote his essay. Hypertext receives much speculative attention in a group of essays by Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Catherine F. Smith, and Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy KaplEin. Unfortunately, those well grounded in the literature will find little that is new in many of the essays. Indeed, rather than presenting fresh perspectives , much of the collection reworks familiar ground, covered by these authors in other contexts. There may simply be too much essaying, and too little originEd and substantial research, going on in this field. Davida Charney does provide a useful overview of cognitive research on reading and writing hypertext that at least introduces an empirical note to the theorizing of the co-contributors. And David Dobrin, with his disarmingly straightforward, common sense approach, asks why there is so much hype about hypertext and whether it isn't very much like other kinds of reading and writing, reflecting only some minor generic conventions that can easily be learned. He wonders, too, where the relevance of the essays lies for those who have spent time teaching low literate adults to read. The editors of this collection have attempted to gain coherence across the collection by having overviews and responses to each subset of essays and by threading cross-references throughout. Unfortunately, the result is an annoying redundancy, with too little advance of content and often gratuitous cross references. To achieve the kind of integration the editors envisioned , the authors would have had to enter a deeper dialogue with their co-contributors. The one sentence throw-away references simply waste space and annoy an impatient reader who seeks substance. Overall, this is a good compilation of essays and is pEirticularly recommended for someone who wants to know what the current issues are. As someone who stays current in the field, however, I would like to see less redundancy , less covering of familiar ground, and more substantial, sustained inquiry from these leaders in the field. STEPHEN A. BERNHARDT New Mexico State University TOBIN SD2BERS, ed. Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 272 p. 1 his new collection of essays, according to its editor Tobin Siebers, attempts to answer the question "What does Postmodernism want?" The answer, as provided by the title of Siebers' introduction "What Does 210Rocky Mountain Review Postmodernism Want? Utopia," ultimately boils down to the following statement : "Postmodernism wants us to think about the contradictions of human existence at the speed of light in order to find in the relativity of time a way to reconcile our differences; but these differences are not always so easily reconciled and many questions linger" (38). Early in the introduction, Siebers acknowledges the "dangers in periodizing " for there "has never been a movement or a period designation that has not shown some signs of emergence before it came into prominence" (3). Nevertheless, in order to make the claim that there is something unique about postmodernism's relationship to utopia, Siebers relies upon a rather limited definition of modernism. He argues that postmodernism should be strictly considered a post-war phenomenon, one that clearly demonstrates the emotional trauma of two world wars. The historical designation of modernism as a phenomenon which "ends" with WWII is not an uncommon one in current theoretical discourse. However, it tends to limit our perceptions of modernist politics and aesthetics to what Astradur Eysteinsson in his book The Concept of Modernism refers to as the "reflection theory" or the notion that modernist art merely mirrors the conditions of social modernity, a notion which reduces modernist texts to mere reproductive or symbolic acts. Siebers tends to combine the reflection theory of modernism with another common paradigm: the notion, closely tied to...