Founded in 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, Mosaic is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to publishing the very best critical work in literature and theory. The journal brings insights from a wide variety of disciplines to bear on literary texts, cultural climates, topical issues, divergent art forms and modes of creative activity. Mosaic combines rigorous scholarship with cutting-edge exploration of theory and literary criticism. It publishes contributions from scholars around the world and it distributes to 34 countries. In North America, Mosaic is read by subscribers in almost every state and province. It can be found in over 500 of the world's major university and college libraries.
Vol. 40, no 4 (décembre 2007)
Harriet Hustis
Falling for Dante: The Inferno in Albert Camus's La chute
Two features of Camus's La chute have received critical attention: its status as a long-delayed response to Jean-Paul Sartre's criticisms of The Rebel and the influence of Dante's Inferno. However, the extent to which these two features of La chute are interconnected and the way in which Camus's intertextual dialogue with Inferno is integral to that interconnection remains unexplored. This essay seeks to repair that omission.
Albert Braz
Mutilated Selves: Pauline Melville, Mário de Andrade, and the Troubling Hybrid
Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale is a postcolonial novel that talks back to a variety of earlier works, notably Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma. This essay argues that a crucial difference between the two texts is their rather dissimilar attitudes toward the cultural and racial multiplicity embodied by the Amazonian trickster Macunaima.
Meredith Goldsmith
The Wages of Weight: Dorothy West's Corporeal Politics
This essay analyzes the black female body as a source of intraracial class conflict, uncovering parallels between West's heroine, social climber Cleo Judson, and her sister, compulsive eater Charity Reid. West links the sisters by their appetites, which the black bourgeoisie sought to repress in their quest for respectability.
Dana Dragunoiu
Neo's Kantian Choice: The Matrix Reloaded and the Limits of the Posthuman
Kant's Categorical Imperative procedure is applied to the conundrum that animates the second installment of The Matrix trilogy: how can Neo act autonomously in a deterministic world? The essay argues that Neo's success depends on his ability to act on principle, an achievement that recovers a liberal humanist ideal from the claims of posthumanism.
Aloys Fleischmann
The Rhetorical Function of Comedy in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11
This essay integrates models of genre and rhetorical analysis, psychoanalysis, and sociological trauma theory. It argues that the impact of the cultural trauma of 9/11 is deployed by Moore to destabilize state-sponsored avenues of that trauma's own propagation, and that the comic form is a crucial mode in this destabilization.
Ian Davidson
Picture This: Space and Time in Lisa Robertson's “Utopia/”
This essay examines relationships between space and time in Lisa Robertson's poem “Utopia/,” demonstrating connections between Robertson's poetics and aspects of spatial theory, and the ways in which her concerns with architectural form, urban space, “ornament,” style, and surface can inform readings of her work.
Valérie Baisnée
“Diamonds of the dustheap”: A quoi servent les journaux des femmes ?
Cet essai analyse le rôle des journaux personnels dans l'écriture des femmes à la lumière de l'intérêt critique croissant pour le genre. S'appuyant sur des textes de langue française et anglaise qu'il confronte aux théories féministes et sociologiques, il démontre que les journaux écrits par des femmes du XXe siècle aident celles-ci à se représenter comme écrivaines et leur permettent d'explorer les rapports complexes entre la vie et l'art.
J.A. Zumoff
The Politics of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest
Although Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is often read as a Marxist novel, this essay argues that the novel's politics are much more ambiguous, reflecting Hammett's position at the time as between his earlier employment as a Pinkerton detective and his later sympathy with the Communist Party.
Allyson Booth
Mr. Ramsay, Robert Falcon Scott, and Heroic Death
This essay charts Mr. Ramsay's development as a character in To the Lighthouse by placing his journey in the historical context of Robert Falcon Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole and in the literary contexts of the works Mr. Ramsay reads and recites to himself throughout the novel.
Jesse Oak Taylor
Environmentalism and Imperial Manhood in Jim Corbett's The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag
This essay examines the “imperial manhood” of the British Empire as constructed in relation to class, nature, and the hunt in Jim Corbett's The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. The essay argues that Corbett re-fashions this masculinity through his burgeoning environmentalism, attempting to maintain his identity despite the empire's dissolution.