Mosaic, vol. 41, no 4 (décembre 2008)

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. 41, no 4 (décembre 2008)

Dawne McCance
Crossings: An Interview with Rodolphe Gasché
This conversation with Rodolphe Gasché—a keynote speaker at Mosaic's 2006 conference, Following Derrida: Legacies—evolved over several months. Mosaic is pleased to publish the interview here.

Rodolphe Gasché
The Deepening of Apperception: On Walter Benjamin's Theory of Film
According to Walter Benjamin, the history of photography is a process of progressive emancipation of reproductive technology from magic and the aura. This process culminates in the art of cinema as a public art in which total transparency is achieved. The essay attempts to investigate the changes in perception that come with the new technologies and the progressive evacuation of the sacred and the auratic from art.

Rodolphe Gasché
The Harmless Detail: On Hegel's Aesthetics
Although "detail" is not a technical concept, it is, according to Hegel, intimately linked to the sphere of the fine arts, in particular classical art, where it is a determined modality of particularization. Focusing on Hegel's analysis of Greek and contemporary statuary, the essay shows how detail is linked to the measurement of the human figure, in particular to the size of its feet.

John Lurz
Modern Mnemosynes: Female Memory and the Allegory of Gender
This essay examines the peculiar alignment of memory and femininity in three modern writers. Placing Henry James's “The Beast in the Jungle” in dialogue with the figure of Mnemosyne instanced in Heidegger and Derrida, it suggests that this gendered figuration leads ultimately into the fundamentally and inescapably allegorical nature of memory itself.

Amit Marcus
Narrative Ethics and Incommensurable Discourses: Lyotard's The Differend and Fowles's The Collector
The essay highlights the contribution of Lyotard's conceptions of incommensurable discourses, damage, and wrong in his work Le Differend to the ongoing disputes between neo-humanists and Levinasians in literary studies. I interpret John Fowles's The Collector in light of Lyotard's thesis, and demonstrate how this thesis is illuminated by Fowles's novel.

Victoria L. Smith
Generative Melancholy: Women's Loss and Literary Representation
Using the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia, this essay develops a feminist analysis of the concept of loss and posits a relationship among women's subjectivity, loss, and literary representation. In recognizing loss and in representing it, certain women's modern and postmodern novels utilize a strategy of resistance—stagings of loss—to effect compensation.

Angela Laflen
(Re)presenting the Fetus: The Limits of Objective Vision in “Birthmates” and “The Ultrasound”
Although fetal images are common in contemporary culture, they still pose interpretive difficulties, which are highlighted in Gish Jen's “Birthmates” and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's “The Ultrasound.” This essay argues that these authors undercut discourses claiming to objectively interpret fetal images by foregrounding conflicts of interpretation and the embodied nature of vision.

Élide Valarini Oliver
Queneau's Poissons and Guimarães Rosa's Jaguar: Two Literary Contributions on the Animal and Human Conditions
This essay, by working through literature, outlines some attitudes towards animals that have become paradigmatic in Western cultures. Following Guimarães Rosa, the essay offers a comparative perspective on how to think “animal thinking.”

Michelle Ann Abate
Becoming a “Red-Blooded” American: White Tomboyism and American Indian Tribalism in Caddie Woodlawn
This essay unpacks the way in which white tomboyism and American Indian tribalism mutually construct each other in Caddie Woodlawn. Caddie's ability to cross the gender line facilitates an ability to cross the racial one and be classified as a non-white “wild Indian,” an act that has implications for her national identity.

Danette DiMarco
J. Sunita Peacock
The Bhadramahila and Adaptation in Meera Syal's and Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach
Bhaji on the Beach critiques the bhadramahila or “respectable woman” construct that took root in nineteenth-century pre-independence, colonial Bengal and that still impacts Indian females living abroad. This essay examines bhadramahila discourse through intertextual and postcolonial lenses and reveals modern disconnects with the historical construct.