John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) is the embodiment of a “frontier” film; he himself has described it as “a story about borders” (West, “An Interview with John Sayles,” 14). The film's genre, its locale, its incorporation of history, ethnicity, generations, and sexual proscriptions, and even its use of pans to cut across time all cohere around this perspective. Nor, as I will indicate, is this concern with borders new to Sayles's art; Lone Star, which taps a number of motifs and conventions familiar to American culture, bringing together a multitude of meanings of boundaries and margins and frontiers, intensifies a theme that exists in every one of his films.

In November 2000, I was sitting in my study in Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish town just south of Tel Aviv, leafing through the latest issue of Critical Inquiry. This was a few weeks into the renewed outbreak of violence in Israel/Palestine, an outbreak that with a single stroke cancelled out the laboriously earned achievements of the Oslo peace accords, claimed the lives of thousands, and all but shattered the hopes of peace activists on both sides. Jaffa itself was transformed overnight, its delicate tissue of Jewish-Arab coexistence torn by Arab riots, Jewish vigilantes, and brutal police intervention. I was therefore looking forward to the momentary escape offered by the American journal that had just arrived in the mail.

When the prophetic seer was asked whether this boy [Narcissus] would live to a ripe old age, he replied: ‘Yes, if he does not come to know himself.’

Unwittingly, he [Narcissus] desired himself, and was himself the object of his own approval, at once seeking and sought … But he could not lay hold upon himself … Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you?

For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.

There is more than one specter haunting Paul Auster's Ghosts. The novel is, indeed, riddled with specters (puns intended): Auster, as writer, haunts a text where reader and critic alike hopelessly strive to catch an equally elusive meaning. I intend to show, in this paper, how Auster, following a lineage going back to the metafiction writers of the late 1960s, passing by others loosely grouped under the term “post-structuralists,” more importantly heralds a new era, and manages to present, in one novel, a full-fledged allegory of how postmodern writing and reading can successfully negotiate the new challenges presented by the dawning virtual age, focusing on the twin concepts of the mirror and the double and the resulting spectral image(s) produced.

Because of his work in the 1930s with tenant and labour organizations and his lyrical critique of the consequences of modern technological progress, George Oppen and his poetry have always been labelled as uniquely “moral” or “ethical” by his closest readers and critics. Poems such as The Materials (1962) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Being Numerous (1968) minimalistically present us with the social and material reality of markedly twentieth-century issues: urban experience, nuclear apocalypse, and the persistence of poverty amid wide-spread wealth, just to name a few. And this thematic concern with ethical issues has been one of the main impetuses behind many of the studies of Oppen's ethics.

One of the most curiously overlooked publishing phenomena of the 1950s was the appearance of the comic book Mad in October 1952 which “burst forth full blown from nowhere on an unsuspecting comic book reading public” into the midst of the domestic Cold War. In 1959 Newsweek observed that “Mad each month sticks a sharp-pronged fork into some part of the social anatomy” while Gloria Steinem recalled: “There was a spirit of satire and irreverence in Mad that was very important, and it was the only place you could find it in the '50s.” And even Marshall McLuhan considered Mad worthy of mention in his influential study, Understanding Media. Noting its “sudden eminence,” he attributed this to its “ludicrous and cool replay of the forms of the hot media of photo, radio, and film.” Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid towards Mad beyond its own retrospective publications, one book, and several short articles. This is unfortunate since the comic provides a sharply satiric, yet extremely perceptive insight into many aspects of Cold War America during the 1950s. Furthermore, as I shall argue, those who wrote and drew for Mad formed an alternative New York intellectual circle to that which is commonly written about. Mad's critique of America was far more effective and devastating than their better-known counterparts and consequently, Mad deserves credit as one of the sources of the counterculture of the 1960s.