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In this, its first issue of 2007, Mosaic presents a second special collection on the topic of "the animal," a companion issue to Volume 39.4, another twelve explorative and innovative contributions to an all-important new field. Look for essays on Coetzee and Gowdy, Shakespeare and Nietzsche, English and Scottish ballads, and medieval animal trials. From Aesop's animals to "mad cow" disease, from dinosaurs to cyborgs, these essays engage the animality question, in all of its complexity and fascination. Look also in this issue for an interview with John Sallis, one in the Mosaic "Crossings" series.
An Interview with John Sallis
by Dawne McCance [show abstract]
Foot in Mouth: Animals, Disease and the Cannibal Complex
by Helen Tiffin [show abstract]
The world-wide panic occasioned by outbreaks of BSE was (and is) incommensurate with the number of human fatalities incurred. This apparent over-reaction can in part be accounted for by BSEs simultaneous disruption of cherished “boundaries” between those
On Marrying a Butcher: Animality and Modernist Anxiety in West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony”
by Carrie Rohman [show abstract]
This essay suggests that West’s story exposes forms of racialized and gendered mastery that are coded as a failed attempt to eliminate and transcend animality. The exposure is read as a sophisticated commentary on species anxiety in modernist literature,
Quia Ego Nominor Leo: Barthes, Stereotypes and Aesop’s Animals
by Tom Tyler [show abstract]
Abstract: Taking Barthes’ discussion of Aesop’s lion as a starting point, this essay examines two uses to which the animals of philosophy and critical theory have been put: as ciphers and as indices. The twin dangers to theory’s beasts, of becoming eithe
Theory from the Fringes: Animals, Ecocriticism, Shakespeare
by Simon Estok [show abstract]
This essay offers ecocritical discussions of animals in Shakespeare, in the spirit of the activist goals that ecocriticism cherishes. Balancing close readings with theory, the essay suggests reasons why animals have remained on the fringes of environment
Dog and Dinosaur: The Modern Animal Story
by Patricia E. Chu [show abstract]
This essay discusses the modern animal story in relation to histories of moving image culture and cybernetics. “New anthropomorphisms” in Jack London’s White Fang, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Robert T. Bakker’s Raptor Red index the
The King Buzzard: Bano Qudsia’s Postnational Allegory and the Nation-State
by Masood Ashraf Raja [show abstract]
Using Bano Qudsia’s Urdu novel Raja Gidh as a point of departure, this essay analyses the ambivalent role of the novel in articulating the national and postnational tendencies of the Islamic world in general and Pakistan in particular.
Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Sherryl Vint [show abstract]
Criticism on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has focused on androids and ignored animals. The novel’s ethical concerns are best understood through animal studies, revealing political deployments of the species boundary to disenfranchise certain huma
“Mean, dangerous, and uncontrollable beasts”: Medieval Animal Trials
by Anila Srivastava [show abstract]
While most contemporary Western legal systems treat animals as chattels to be acquired, controlled, and disposed of at their owners’ pleasure, animals have historically been treated as partial legal persons to allow the legal system to respond to the unpr
The Beast Within: Animals as Lovers in Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
by Goldie Morgentaler [show abstract]
Drawing on both folklore studies and literary analysis, this essay contends that the figure of the animal paramour in the Child ballads represents, in objectified form, the inherent animality and duality of human nature. Ballads featuring sexual relatio
Memory, Hybridity and Creative Alliance in Haruki Murakami’s Fiction
by Amy Ty Lai [show abstract]
This essay explores the use of animals in Haruki Murakami’s fiction, where animals serve as the emblem of selfhood; where human-animal hybrids manifest the fragmented self; and where becoming-animal inspires a creative process which human can fare better.
A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy
by Onno Oerlemans [show abstract]
A comparison of Coetzee’s Disgrace and Gowdy’s The White Bone reveals that while it is possible to generate sympathy for animal being while resisting describing animal sentience in human terms, anthropomorphism can be a valuable and sophisticated strategy
Portrait of the Artist as a Bear: Jazz, Nietzsche and the Animal Mask
by Jerome Stueart [show abstract]
How does an author use a talking animal in realistic fiction? This essay examines the history of bears in legend and literature, as well as theories of Nietzsche and jazz, in order to understand Rafi Zabor’s saxophone-playing bear in The Bear Comes Home
