Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture [Paperback]

Harold Jaffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2007

At a time when most American fiction writers steer clear of direct political statement, Harold Jaffe gives us 14 searing, unsettling essays toward a post-millennial aesthetics of responsibility and conscience. For some 25 years, Harold Jaffe s name has been synonymous with confrontational innovative fiction with a subversive edge. Beyond the Techno-Cave collects the author's recent "creative nonfiction," including insights on art, writing, technology, global politics, travel, and intersections of all of these. Many of Jaffe's texts read like formally innovative narratives, others function like conceptual art, remaining in the mind long after. Everywhere evident is Jaffe's broad erudition, social commitment, and energized, elegant writing. The collection includes Jaffe s moral call on writers to return from their inner emigrations and re-include themselves in our world and our politics, "The Writer During Wartime."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Harold Jaffe is the author of thirteen previous works of fiction or docufiction, including Terror-Dot Gov (2005), 15 Serial Killers (2002), Sex for the Millennium (1999), and Beasts (1986). Among other honors, he has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. He is the long-time editor-in-chief of one of our most significant journals of avant-garde prose, Fiction International.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Starcherone Books (March 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978881117
• ISBN-13: 978-0978881115
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,819,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harold Jaffe is the author of 15 volumes of fiction, docufiction, and non-fiction. His work has been widely anthologized and translated, most recently into French, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, and Farsi. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Virtuosic performance-prose, March 15, 2007

By 

Maya Yin "Maya Yin" (Chaing Mai, Thailand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (Paperback)

Go spelunking in the Techno-Cave with author Harold Jaffe as he takes you underground to expose the duplicity and double standards of corporate entrenched American media, culture and politics.

Once again Jaffe's genius examines the socio-political post-Millennial culture as it corrodes before our eyes, the final step before sliding finally into the abyss. Jaffe performs his careful micro-surgery with sharpened katana blade held high and bright-beamed spotlight aimed directly at the hypocrisy of the present American administration. And, at a time when few have the courage to step up and speak the truth, Jaffe subtly and skillfully indicts the American power machine as it struggles to maintain its ever-increasing death grip of domination on the globe.

As always, Jaffe's style is elegantly varied yet remains on target. The eloquent, almost heartbreakingly poignant style of "Dance" resonates with a dulcet music all its own, while "Gitmo" is a searing interrogation of the horrifying, deplorable and shameful war crimes that continue to this day at Guantanamo, Cuba. In "Suu Kyi/Giacometti," two seemingly unrelated figures are aligned together to ultimately dovetail in a moving testimony of endurance.

Inside the Techno Cave Jaffe's melodious prose sings out like a mystic shaman against oppression, against the neo-cons, against sameness and conformity.

May Jaffe long continue his virtuosic performance-prose. It is fortunate that we have his voice for comfort in the vast void of what passes for culture these days; "reality" shows, self help books, fast food, Prozac...for anyway you look at it Dear American, you are not free, your life is owned, owned by the very entities that Jaffe rails against. Do you "own' you cell-phone, house or SUV? Or do the phone/mortgage/car companies own you?

Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer voices like Jaffe who are gutsy enough to stand up and interrogate the mean-spirited mess of our post Millennial world.

Tanya Shannon
Belfast, Ireland

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jaffe takes us "Beyond the Techno Cave", March 21, 2007

By 

D. G. Lain (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (Paperback)

In his "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Frederic Jameson writes that "...this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror."

Via his trope of colonization, used throughout his new collection "Beyond the Techno-Cave" Harold Jaffe demonstrates a profound and thorough understanding of the ways in which the processes of cultural mediation Jameson indicates are at this historical juncture total, and perhaps terminal.

Jaffe's praxis, though, as indicated in his motifs of dream, wilderness, compassion, internal exile, and the guerilla fighter's cagey exploitation of institutional weaknesses, priviledges consciousness and culture in a way that eludes a strictly economic critique, and owes perhaps more to Gramsci and Benjamin than other thinkers in this particular lineage.

That said, the realization of the dialectical process in Jaffe's "Suu Kyi/Giacometti," is simply masterful, and suggests one of the many ways in which this collection might be useful to college-level instructors and students seeking to access oppostional strategies to the official culture while still functioning within its co-determinants.

Even by the high standards that regular readers of Harold Jaffe have come to appreciate, this is highly satisfying fiction collection. The addition here of three highly topical and provocative essays serves to clarify Jaffe's views of the ways in which artists and writers might stage interventions within a postmodern culture literally defined by its processes of appropriation, and serve to widen his already considerable theoretical range.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Harold Jaffe: The Writer In War Time, April 18, 2007

By 

Tria Andrews - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture (Paperback)

Like the title of one of Beyond the Techno-Cave's most powerful texts, Harold Jaffe is "The Writer in War Time." Indeed, this collection points up the marginalization of innovative and "engaged" art amid texts that emerge as dreams, essays, and the interwoven "docufiction." Jaffe's Beyond the Techno-Cave, like many of the words he selects to boldface, moves and it is this movement--often unexpected--that so energizes the text. This relentless energy, active and provocative meditation, positions Jaffe not only as a gifted artist in war time, but as an artist whose work is likewise engaged in the struggle.