Mosaic

While often regarded as similar, the difference between sympathetic and empathetic identification is essential in the so-called “expressivist turn” that took place in early modernism. This essay argues that the deep connection between Baudelaire’s rebellion against realism and German aesthetician Robert Vischer’s concept of Einfühlung, or “in-feeling,” has not been explored sufficiently and can shed light on modernism’s distinctive identity and the deep perceptual changes that underscore its innovations.

I read Mark McMorris’s experimental poetry in the historical context that conditioned it. In the 1970s, his native Jamaica underwent profound political change after colonial rule, and McMorris draws intertextually on public discourse involving an ethics of responsibility towards others, which I highlight through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

This essay reads Erin Mouré’s O Cadoiro with Derrida’s Archive Fever and against lyric criticism’s dream that its genre lives, arguing that Mouré’s work anatomizes the lyric and queers its archive to reveal that it has always been nominal: its singular voice and its proper whole alive in name only.

Revisiting Plato’s Republic in light of the cultural shift from orality to literacy, this essay suggests that Plato is fully aware of myth’s indispensability for logos-oriented culture—of the fact that both poetry and philosophy rely on mythical thinking. This dialogue enables us to think the impossibility of the philosopher’s city, the city that expelled its poets.

This essay explores Wallace Stevens’s collection Parts of a World alongside Roland Barthes’s discussion of the paradoxical “absence-as-presence” of the photograph. The collection marks an important transition toward the development of a new space beyond representation in Stevens’s poetry—where the “figure” is revealed to be nothing other than the process of its own figuration.

Defining poetry as the potential of enjambment, Giorgio Agamben concludes that the final non-enjambed line of a poem cannot really be “poetry.” My essay explores this poetic state of exception in terms of Agamben’s project of reconciling poetry and philosophy in the face of Plato’s exile.

In 1922, Einstein and Bergson publicly discussed the nature of time. I argue that this debate, which pivoted on the question of whether there is one time or a plurality of times, and especially the phenomenological stance promoted in it by Bergson, makes for an illuminating context against which to read Stein’s 1920s literary thinking on temporality.

Drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and Peirce’s philosophy of science, I argue that scholarship comes closest to contemporary creative art at the point at which it generates doubt in prior knowledge, forcefully. Foucault and Auden exemplify this convergence.

Drawing on interdisciplinary work on the significance of cultural artefacts by scholars such as Bill Brown and W.J.T. Mitchell, this essay explores images of things in Komunyakaa’s recent mythopoetic verse while connecting this motif to the thingness of poetry itself, the latent and insistent force of its rhythmic form.

“A history of animated nature must itself be animated,” Thoreau recorded in his Journal in 1850, implying that such histories must animate the imagination of their readers if they are to make any impression on them. Yet, scholars claim that Thoreau ultimately grew disenchanted with figurative modes of representing nature and became more concerned with describing it with painstaking accuracy. I contend otherwise. This essay examines “Autumnal Tints,” written toward the end of his life, as Thoreau’s version of the kind of animated history that could inspire his readers to join him in his lifelong quest “to find God in nature.”

Many poems in the tradition of Japanese haiku appear to exhibit what John Ruskin named “the pathetic fallacy.” A proper understanding of the philosophical framework within which these poems were created will show that this charge is unfounded because it relies on an overly stark separation of perceiving subject and perceived object.

This essay examines the role of the poet in Nietzsche’s prose, focusing on three attributes to Nietzsche’s discussion: the poet and philosopher as single entity; the poet-philosopher’s responsibility for maintaining the ability to respond; and the poet-philosopher’s responsibility for discovering possibilities oriented toward the future.

By utilizing the work of Giorgio Agamben, this essay examines how the poetic can exist as the last refuge of meaning in an “atheological” world, that is, one without its previous theological justifications.

In this essay I examine how Raymond Roussel and Fernando Pessoa extract a poetics of nonsense from the limitations of language’s signifying potential. From the peculiar self-reflexive rhythm(s) of their work I draw the speculation that meaning and thinking are contagious matters.

This essay explores John Cage’s silence about his homosexuality in relation to Jean-François Lyotard’s theorizations of the differend and the avant-garde. Examining several of Cage’s poems, I argue that Cage’s silence was a source of strength and that Cage silently spoke his homosexuality in avant-garde idioms.

This essay analyzes the ways in which interwar writers such as Hamilton, Hampson, Massingham, Orwell, and those involved with Mass-Observation rewrote Victorian ideas of pubs as the products of personal failure, figuring them instead as communal centres. It explores images of the public house as a refuge from advanced capitalism and the social functions it actually served.

This essay engages Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories, a major work of evolutionary literary criticism, with Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Year of the Flood. Bringing these texts into dialogue demonstrates both the power of and some potential limits to an evocritical interpretive paradigm, particularly with respect to religion.

Susan Meiselas’s historical photographs in Nicaragua contrast sharply with Gregory Crewdson’s postmodern, overtly fictional photographs in Twilight. Examining differences in the photographers’ depiction of time, action, public space, and gender, this essay argues that the two photobooks resist neat distinctions between the photograph as document and the photograph as picture.

This essay makes the connection between Robert Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls and social-political issues around Fetal-Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) for Canada’s First Nations. It proposes and problematizes a Fetal-Alcohol reading of the novel, using it as a paradigm for the complexities of discussing possible FASD in First Nations communities.

Helen’s quilt in Thomas King’s novel Truth and Bright Water tells the story of her personal metamorphosis and, as such, can be viewed as an autobiographical, social, and political text. This essay illustrates how, through quiltmaking, Helen finds discrete parts of herself and emerges from erasure as an indigenous woman.

Mambety’s final film, La Petite vendeuse de soleil, presents the intersection of orality and literacy in a globalized Dakar while rejecting dichotomous discourses of tradition versus modernity. This essay argues that the film posits appropriation and communal redefinition of modern technologies as an important part of Africa’s struggle against neo-colonial dependence.

Drawing on Pierre Nora’s contribution to memory studies, this essay examines the mediation of history by deportation memory. Literary texts and ethnography are used to illuminate the historical experience of two Muslim peoples of the Caucasus: the Chechens, deported to Central Asia in 1944, and the Hunzib, who remained behind.

Ethel Wilson’s first novel, Hetty Dorval, is generally regarded as a story of the triumph of good over attractive, female evil. This essay analyzes the novel as a “screen” or “cover” for underlying anxieties in order to examine the unconscious linkages between cultural concepts of (maternal) femininity and death.