Linda Kauffman

Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollman; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.

he common thread is that all these works are in—or can be slipped into—the category of letters from women to men who have abandoned or ignored them. Such real or feigned love letters (Kauffman insists on calling them "amorous epistolary discourse") form a coherent body of literature that is here profitably analyzed, though a reader may well feel that the sample is not only small, but also skewed. Kauffman subscribes so thoroughly to the current doctrine that literature grows out of other literature and has nothing to do with life that once, when she kicks over the traces a bit, she feels called on to defend herself against an assumed charge of "naive mimeticism."

In Special Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire.

Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us.