Mosaic (Winnipeg) articles from March 2000

Mosaic (Winnipeg) archives from March 2000

Introduction.
March 1, 2000... Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra proposes this as the sole regulative certainty governing all things in the world: "that they prefer--to dance on the feet of chance" (186). As Jacques Derrida puts the point in of Grammatology, "The...

Lacan and Claudel's Crusts: The Thematic of the Father.
March 1, 2000... Jacques Lacan's encounter with Paul Claudel's play Crusts foregrounds the typical traumatization of the psychoanalytic subject in the face of paternal prohibitions. Lacan's reading of Claudel shows that the subject's privation is most extreme...

The "Strange Music" of Salome: Oscar Wilde's Rhetoric of Verbal Musicality.
March 1, 2000... Walter Pater once proposed that all art aspires to the condition of music. Oscar Wilde's drama Salome harbors that aspiration, but in a deliberately equivocal fashion, casting verbal music as a seductive but ultimately futile venture. Wilde...

Emerson's Nature, Paralogy, and the Physics of the Sublime.
March 1, 2000... While Emerson has been read as exemplar of a transcendental sublime, the electromagnetism of Faraday inspired him to embrace an alternative sublime vision wherein matter is a field of electrical force, not part of a spiritual whole. Emerson's...

Sarah and Sappho: Lesbian Reference in The French Lieutenant's Woman.
March 1, 2000... This essay examines the ambiguity that attends to lesbian sexuality in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. While the narrator of the novel struggles to deny the lesbianism of Sarah Woodruff--the unbounded sexuality that links Sarah to...

Gide, Nietzsche, and the Ghost of Philosophy.
March 1, 2000... Gide's novels can be understood not only as bearing the influence of philosophy, but also as supporting a critical and thematic stance toward it. The influence comes into sharp relief in Gide's intellectual connection and debt to Nietzsche. How...

Roland Barthes and the Syllogisms of Literary Criticism.
March 1, 2000... This essay sees literary criticism as participating in a dialectic between is and ought, between science and art. Using a neo-Aristotelian version of rhetoric, the essay argues that even a Critic like Roland Barthes, whose work seems to be...

Towers and Mirrors: Aspects of Space in La Princesse de Cl[acute{e}]ves.
March 1, 2000... Mme de La Fayette's La Princesse de Cl[acute{e}]ves creates an imaginative space at once lofty and confining where order is ensured through the exclusion of what threatens. The novel's imposition of form on chaos is concretized in the...

Live from Golgotha: Gore Vidal and the Problem of Satiric Reinscription.
March 1, 2000... Queer theorizing about the constructed nature of sexuality and poststructuralist theorizing about the discursive nature of history emphasize the manner in which satire reinscribes as it destabilizes. This essay explores these themes focussing...

Taking Chances: Speculation and Games of Detection in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.
March 1, 2000... This essay examines affinities between strategies of detection in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and contemporary game theoretic analyses in economics. Both illuminate a modernist impulse to domesticate irrationality by interpreting its...

The Game of Late Capitalism: Gambling and Ideology in The Music of Chance.
March 1, 2000... Examining Paul Auster's The Music of Chance alongside Jean Baudrillard's theory of chance and seduction, this essay suggests that rapid growth of the gaming industry is a symptom of late capitalism. The codependence of capitalism and its...