Founded in 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, Mosaic is aninterdisciplinary journal devoted to publishing the very best criticalwork in literature and theory. The journal brings insights from a widevariety 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 oftheory and literary criticism. It publishes contributions from scholarsaround the world and it distributes to 34 countries. In North America,Mosaic is read by subscribers in almost every state and province. Itcan be found in over 500 of the world's major university and collegelibraries.
Vol. 41, no 3 (septembre 2008) - Antigone
A special issue that features a review of the current field of Antigonestudies along with twelve studies that engage the figure and the playthrough the work of such critics as Hegel, Lacan, Butler, Agamben,Benjamin, Derrida, Nussbaum, Kristeva, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir; andsuch topics as sovereignty, mourning, family, ethics, community,modernity, democracy, gender, and law. The issue includes a partialtranslation of Leopoldo Marechal's AntígonaVélez.
Keri Walsh
Antigone Now
“Antigone Now” assesses the influence of recent scholarship inclassics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory on the reception ofSophocles's Antigone, and suggests that the fields of dramaticcriticism, theatre history, and performance studies offer promisingresources for future work on Antigone.
Katrin Beushausen
Dangerous Fracture: Undermining the Order of the Law in Sophocles's Antigone
This essay offers a political reading of Antigone as a fundamentalquestioning of the law. Drawing on Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben, ittraces within the play a scandalous duplicity of violence at the heartof the law that always already undermines its authority. Today, thisfracture of the law once again haunts democracy in a concealedsovereignty reborn.
Karin De Boer
Hegel's Antigone and the Tragedy of Cultural Difference
This essay deploys Hegel's account of Antigone in Phenomenology ofSpirit to reflect on conflicts that challenge the contemporary world.It argues that contemporary discourses often fail to recognize thetragic nature of the conflicts between such values as are defended bythe state and by cultural minorities.
Victoria I. Burke
From Ethical Substance to Reflection: Hegel's Antigone
Hegel's treatment of Sophocles's Antigone exposes a tension in our ownlandscape between religious and civil autonomy. Like Antigone, womenoften find that they can identify with the unreflective ethicalsubstance in which they are at home only if they are at odds with thepublic law, as represented by Creon.
Shoni Rancher
Suffering Tragedy: Hegel, Kierkegaard and Butler on the Tragedy of Antigone
Hegel argues that modernity lacks the substantive ties that are centralto the opposition in Antigone. Kierkegaard's and Butler'sinterpretations respond by answering why the problems that the ancienttragedy raises are still problems for modernity.
Judith Fletcher
Citing the Law in Sophocles' Antigone
Antigone's defiance of Creon's interdiction against burying Polyneicesactivates a form of public discourse in Thebes that corresponds to someof the informal discursive processes of Athenian democracy. Thestructure of the text, which allows Antigone to articulate the edictbefore Creon repeats it to the Elders, emphasizes her powerfulintervention in public talk.
Walter Corbella
Antigone Fragment
In his play, Antígona Vélez, Argentine author Leopoldo Marechal adaptedthe Greek myth to the social reality of the nineteenth-centuryArgentine pampas, when new settlers clashed against the originalinhabitants of the land. Thus, Marechal examined the forces that helpedto shape his nation, exploring the limits of honour and tradition, andproducing a moving portrayal of the conflicts that arise when love andobligation are at odds.
Steve Lukits
The Devastated Nest: Crises of Identity in Wuthering Heights and Antigone
The shared metaphor of a devastated nest in Antigone and WutheringHeights signals feminist dissent against constraining social order.This essay presents an extended reading of this significant trope.Rhetorical, intertextual, and cultural analyses reveal that patriarchalforces in the tragedy and in the novel domesticate and suppress thewomen's rebellions.
R. Clifton Spargo
The Apolitics of Antigone's Lament: (From Sophocles to Ariel Dorfman)
Apoliticsdescribes motives or actions arising as though from outside thedominant paradigm of politics, in a manner typified by Antigone'sfamous gesture. Proceeding from Sophocles's ancient figure, throughKierkegaard's modern revision, to Ariel Dorfman's newly allegorizedLatin American heroines, this essay interprets Antigone's conflict withrogue sovereignty as signifying a crisis in all so-called politicalcategories.
Christel Stalpaert
The Mind Taken Hostage: Antigone's Corporeal Memory in Mind the Gap
Mind the Gap, a drama written by Flemish author Stefan Hertmans in2000, features the figure of Antigone, whose cruel past and bodilysuffering intrude on her capacity to remember, such that she cannotexpress herself but through literary silences and cognitive stalling.Antigone shares similarities with Artaud's prise de conscience of hislived selfhood as a suffering body. In Antigone's body-poetics, therelationship between her physical body and her own history can be heard.
Damian Stocking
Antigone, désoeuvrée: Tragedy, Finitude, and Community
An attempt to resolve the question of whether Greek tragedy does thework of communal affirmation or political critique, this essay employsthe definition of community offered by Jean-Luc Nancy in La CommunautéDésoeuvrée to argue that it is precisely by means of critique thattragedy constitutes an Athenian “community” as such.
Amy E. Story
Simone de Beauvoir and Antigone: Feminism and the Conflict between Ethics and Politics
This essay examines Simone de Beauvoir's reading of Antigone in “MoralIdealism and Political Realism.” I argue that Beauvoir's reading of theplay is inadequate because it does not take into account theconstraints Antigone faces as a woman in her time and place. I offer areading that accounts for gender in ways that Beauvoir might have donelater in her career.
Graeme Stout
Castrating Antigone: The Cliché of Terror in Marco Bellocchio's Devil in the Flesh
This essay argues that Antigone serves as both a subtext and a materialexample of misreading within Marco Bellocchio's Devil in the Flesh. Theemergence of Sophocles's text in the final scene of the film is readthrough Pasolini's concept of the cinema of poetry and Deleuze's notionof the cliché.
Kathryn Walker
Between Individual Principles and Communal Obligation: Ethical Duty in Sophocles's Antigone
Building on Lacan's interpretation of Antigone, this essay focuses onthe ethical significance of the relationship between individual andcommunity. It suggests that as the characters negotiate betweenindividual principles and communal obligation, the play presents aworldview defined by both a deep sense of communal obligation and animperative to transcend communal norms.