Issue 27.2
Overview
General Issue
Published: April 1994
See the issue summary and contents below.
6 essays, totalling 136 pages
$15.00 CAD
This general issue of Mosaic contains essays on symbolism in the Odyssey, seventeenth-century garden theory and La Princesse de Clèves, literature and painting in the eighteenth century, an impasse between philosophy and literature, a Lacanian reading of A Question of Power, and a study of David Cronenberg’s “Canadianness.”
The Fall of Troy and the Slaughter of the Suitors: Ultimate Symbolic Correspondence in the Odyssey.Thomas Dilworth The slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey corresponds symbolically to the fall of Troy. The correspondence implies an emotional dynamics in Homer and his audiences for which cultural anthropologists provide verification. As these dynamics imply, the recitation of the epic achieved psychological reparation. | |
La Princesse de Cl?ves and the Politics of Versailles Garden Design.Ann Leone This essay applies seventeenth century garden theory and history to feminist work on the politics of space and the gaze in La Princesse de Clèves. The Princess appropriates initiative through a control of perspective that reflects the political use of garden space at Louis XIV’s Versailles. | |
"If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": Pictorial Strategy in Arnold's Revision of Wordsworth.Lawrence J. Starzyk This essay explores the way a pictorial principle links literature and painting in the nineteenth century and elucidates essential changes in social and cultural thinking. The specific focus is on the structural significance of pentimento as reflected in the Arnold/Wordsworth relationship. | |
Two Different Ethics: Philosophy and Literature.James J. Snow This essay develops the thesis that philosophy and literature are at loggerheads. Philosophy cannot tolerate the multi-perspectivism that is as integral to literature as it is antagonistic to philosophy. It is argued that we should therefore be wary of recent philosophical attempts to appropriate literature. | |
Bessie Head's A Question of Power: A Lacanian Psychosis.Patrick Colm Hogan This essay outlines Lacan’s theories on the social constitution of personal identity and the fragmentation of identity in psychosis. It then turns to the psychotic breakdown of Head’s main character, Elizabeth, interpreting her unstable self-images and, to a lesser extent, her male and female “imagoes,” in Lacanian terms. | |
The Canadianness of David Cronenberg.William Beard The works of David Cronenberg have rarely been considered an integral aspect of Canadian culture, although he is probably the most important filmmaker in English Canada. The present essay finds an affinity between Cronenberg’s work and the classic paradigm of Canadian culture advanced by Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood and others. |