Issue 29.1
Overview
General Issue
Published: March 1996
See the issue summary and contents below.
7 essays, totalling 142 pages
$15.00 CAD
In anticipation of Mosaic’s upcoming special issue on otherness, this general issue offers essays on other (minor, postcolonial, Chinese) literature, other (female) desire, other literary traditions, and the future as other. The essays engage with a range of philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, René Girard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Hegel.
Shakespeare as ‘Minor Theater’: Deleuze and Guattari and the Aims of AdaptationMark Fortier This essay explores the way the concept of “minor literature” developed by Deleuze and Guattari can be employed to elucidate the dynamics of adaptations of Shakespeare. Specific focus is on the work of Carmelo Bene, Herbert Blau and Heiner Müller. | |
Triangular Desire and the Sororal Bond: The ‘Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill’Diane M. Chambers Based on the issue of whether a widower should be allowed to marry his sister-in-law, the “Deceased Wife’s Sister” controversy provides fascinating insights into the perception of sisterhood during the nineteenth century. Depicting two sisters and a man in a potentially rivalrous relationship, the narratives used in the debate serve to highlight feminine desire and thus to question the male triangular model proposed by René Girard. | |
The International Politics of Existentialism: From Sartre, to Olson, to BoweringTrent Keough This essay challenges the view that the poetics of George Bowering are derivative from Charles Olson by demonstrating that Bowering also incorporated the concepts of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. The essay also questions the “originality” of Olson’s phenomenology by illustrating its similarities with the existentialism of Sartre. | |
Iconicity, Immersion, and Otherness: The Hegelian ‘Dive’ of J.M. Coetzee and Adrienne RichBarbara Eckstein This essay explores the way that “diving into the wreck” provides a dialogic link between Coetzee’s postcolonial novel Foe and Rich’s feminist poetry, in the context of Hegel’s emphasis upon immersion as a means to comprehending an/other. The iconic sign is shown to provide a ladder from arbitrary word to physical object, which in the case of Friday is the plan of a slave ship. | |
Zen Comedy in Postcolonial Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the DayJohn Rothfork Ostensibly the diary of an English butler, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day expresses a Buddhist critique of Confucian ethics, a dialectic that is as basic to Japanese culture as that between Christianity and Greek culture in the Western tradition. This essay explicates the novel by using methods devised by postmodern comparative philosophers. | |
Death-Watch: Terminal Illness and The Gaze in Sharon Olds’s The FatherLaura E Tanner This essay attempts to understand the intimacy of the gaze not as a means of negotiating sexual difference but as a way of establishing connection between a healthy subject and a person with terminal illness. Using the work of theorists such as Mulvey, Foucault and Kristeva, the essay explores the dynamics of the gaze in Olds’s volume of poetry about the dying of her father. | |
The End Once Again: Art and Politics at the Close of the CenturyCharles Molesworth The end of the century tempts us to design grand schemes for art and politics, and at the same time to distrust such schemes. This has consequences for our understanding of culture and history. Dewey’s esthetics, however, provides us with a way to resist such temptation without abandoning hope. |