Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture)

Enacts and evokes the changes and creative possibilities emerging from contemporary literary technologies (electronic media).

Bookend challenges distinctions between prose and poetry as well as between popular and academic culture, embodying a wide array of poetic techniques to argue that form and structure are themselves essential to artistic and cultural meaning. It critiques the current media environs, a hybrid reality in which the individual encounters his or her public and private selves in the midst of a crisis of values. Each of the five anatomies represents both a personal and a local account of where the author finds himself in social and educational terms, and an attempt is made throughout to situate this individual experience against a global imperative.