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Mosaic : a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature

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ISSN (Print) 0027-1276 - ISSN (Online) 1925-5683
Published by Project MUSE

[318 journals]

Bearing Witness: Edith Wharton’s The Book of the Homeless
- Abstract: By Susan Goodman I believe if I were dead, and anyone asked me to come back and witness for France, I should get up out of my grave to do it. Edith Wharton remembered how “strange” life in Paris became before the onset of World War I: “There were moments,” she wrote, “when I felt I had died, and waked up in an unknown world. And so I had. Two days later [3 Aug. 1914] war was declared” (Backward 338). Germany had invaded Belgium, a minor obstacle in its long-planned march to Paris. Great Britain, denouncing Germany’s “rape” of Belgium, joined the fray within twenty-four hours.1 The world had never known a war like the one that ensued, which is as remembered for its scope and the millions of lost lives as for arsenals ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.goodman.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: World War, 1914-1918
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
The Uses of Genre and the Classification of Speculative Fiction
- Abstract: By R.B. Gill Speculative fiction, a widely read but ill-defined grouping of works, fits uneasily into our notions of standard literature. Although it includes a great diversity of texts, many of canonical impeccability, speculative fiction is often considered a commercial rather than a literary category. Yet its existence on the edge of the customary literary world leads to basic questions that illuminate not only speculative fiction itself, but also relationships among all works of fiction. Does speculative fiction belong in a list of literary types and, if so, how should it be defined? What should be the nature and purposes of the categories established by a definition of speculative fiction? Optimally, such a definition ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.gill.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: Speculative fiction
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
The City and its Ontology in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet
- Abstract: By Ray Morrison Europe: a civilization based upon the principle of the Will. Hence power, possession, and prohibition. An arid tour among the amenities leading us back to the Taoist formulae after centuries of illness. Could one say that the function of the poem is to win over the will in man and to produce that inner order which is love-in-time? In a “Note,” just after the title of Justine, Durrell states, “The characters in this story, the first of a group, are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real” (Quartet). In one of the earliest reviews of The Quartet, Lionel Trilling had this to say of the city: “Alexandria, so far from being a ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.morrison.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: Alexandria (Egypt)
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Living in Different Universes: Autism and Race in Robinson’s Gilead and Home
- Abstract: By Susan Petit Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home answer one question about the character Jack Boughton—why he has returned to his home town after twenty years away—by revealing his secret at the end of each book: he has a black wife, Della, and a young mixed-race son, Robert, and he has returned alone to all-white Gilead, Iowa, in the summer of 1956 to see if they can live there as a family, having failed to do so in segregated St. Louis. A related question—why he acts and thinks differently from everyone else—is not answered explicitly. Careful reading, however, shows that Jack is mildly autistic and that his autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, helps explain his youthful misdeeds and many of his present traits. His real ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.petit.html">Read More</a>
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Hiding in Plain Sight: Problems of Modernist Self-Representation in the Encounter Between Adolf Loos and Josephine Baker
- Abstract: By Christina Svendsen Josephine Baker’s name has appeared on three autobiographies—none of which she wrote herself. They were authored by the men in her life: a journalist who helped discover her (the ironically named Marcel Sauvage); an early lover-turned-manager named Pepito Abatino; and her second husband, a fellow performer who shortened his name to “Jo” so that he would have the same nickname as hers. Most recently, a posthumous book mixing the genres of memoir and biography has been published by Jean-Claude Baker, a son she adopted when he was already an adult, who not only took her surname but also liked to use a shortened version of his Christian name that was a variant of Josephine’s own, like Jo. To differing degrees, all ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.svendsen.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: Loos, Adolf, 1870-1933
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Possibles: Of Blodgett/Brault
- Abstract: By Mustapha Marrouchi 1 La poésie?. . . Que signifie ce mot? Ted Blodgett and Jacques Brault began their careers by writing elegantly crafted, jewel-like poems. In the 1980s, they shifted toward an “open field” poetics, but though their verse is “free” in that they vary the beat, like jazz, from line to line, they have remained formalists in the way of the modernists—taking the risks and making the changes that are prompted by necessity in the treacherous city of language. The poem is for them, as it was for Wallace Stevens, the “cry of its occasion” (“Snow” 73). Even so, it has not been often enough remarked that they have been practicing, in addition to radical sentiments, radical juxtapositions. The open forms in ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.marrouchi.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: French-Canadian poetry
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Introduction
- Abstract: By Dawne McCance Even my New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought betrays some ambivalence about the meaning of “modernity.” The book (which does not include an entry on its title word “modern”) defines “modernity” as a term “sometimes used to refer simply to recent times,” but increasingly to denote “a phase in societal development”; also “sometimes seen as dating from the Enlightenment of 17th and 18th century Europe, sometimes from the development of industrial society in the 19th century” (540). A similarly fluid “modernity” emerges from this issue, not as a term defined but as significant nonetheless to the discussion undertaken in at least three of the following essays. In “Hiding in Plain Sight: Problems of Modernist ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.mccance.html">Read More</a>
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Cautionary Whales? Adolescence and Genre in Juno and Push
- Abstract: By Rachael McLennan They call me the cautionary whale. Last week we went to the museum. A whole whale is hanging from the ceiling. Bigger than big! OK, have you ever seen a Volkswagen car that’s like a bug? Um huh, you know what I’m talking about. That’s how big the heart of a blue whale is. I know it’s not possible, but if that heart was in me could I love more? Ms Rain, Rita, Abdul? I would like to. In his study of contemporary fictions about adolescence, Kenneth Millard argues that genre is particularly important to the study of adolescence: Adolescents are important because of the ways in which they are at the forefront of social change, even while they are simultaneously the products of an adult social ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.mclennan.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: Reitman, Jason, 1977-
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Realism and the Discursive Dynamics of the Popular Periodical, 1900–1930
- Abstract: By Janet G. Casey Realism cannot be understood only in relation to the world it represents; it is also a debate [. . .] with competing modes of representation. Cultural historians have long noted the strong relation between periodical culture and literary realism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, various serial publications hosted debates about the efficacy of realism as an aesthetic approach, lending it legitimacy in the broader cultural arena; moreover, both literary and mainstream magazines provided remunerative publishing opportunities for realist writers of all types (including naturalists and regionalists), keeping them and their works viable while helping to strengthen the perception ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.casey.html">Read More</a>
 Keywords: American periodicals
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00
Making the Real Appear: Schmitt’s Enigma Variations as a “Traversal of the Fantasy”
- Abstract: By Graham Wolfe Aided by recent translations of his novels and plays, France’s Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, long famous in his home country, is achieving increasing recognition beyond Europe. According to Schmitt’s website, his plays have now been performed in more than fifty countries. Enigma Variations, his most popular work since its debut in 1996, was brought to English and North American audiences in 2000 through a production starring Donald Sutherland. In the past decade it has been staged with increasing frequency by both amateur and professional companies. Of Schmitt’s plays, David Bradby states, “He is not primarily interested in dramatic experiment but in exploring all the different ideas that may follow from a ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/v046/46.2.wolfe.html">Read More</a>
 PubDate: 2013-06-10T00:00:00-05:00

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