Introduction

Mosaic 53.1 is a general issue, and it struck me immediately on rereading the range of essays that make up the volume just how demanding interdisciplinary work can be, both on its authors as well as its readers. The very different textual ecologies that each of these essays instance pose a variety of obstacles to comfortable habitation, let alone ease of entrance. Subject matter itself can be prohibitive, even if a title exerts an attraction, and of course, the use of theory itself can be as much a repellent as a lodestone. Indeed, at the risk of misreading through extension Judith P. Saunders’s wonderful essay, “The Poetry of Thomas Lux: Biophilia Meets Theory of Mind,” it is tempting to say that the possibilities of entering into dialogue with any one text, let alone moving between all of the texts in the issue, are fraught in the extreme.

Saunders approaches Lux’s poetry through a mix of evolutionary biology and cognitive theory, and this makes complete sense given Lux’s “eccentric,” wide-ranging, zoocentric subjects. Yet just how many times I had to read this essay before anything really sunk in—before I finally settled into it—I cannot say. In any case, I am so glad to be in the company of “the breathing and heat / of a billion writhing / and alive things” that Saunders highlights in Lux’s poetry (61). What an essay! And what a revelation it was when I finally read Saunders saying that projection is an evolutionary trait. This was something I could hold onto. Of course, the sensitive critic in me who has carefully nurtured the capacity for imaginative engagement with works of art and literature rolled over in his grave at the thought. Daisy, my border collie, never a reader of what Saunders calls theory of mind (ToM), but ever attentive to my gestures—especially the minutia of facial expressions and the donning of outerwear—increased in stature. None of which is to say that projection and its deep connection with what Derrida calls teleopoiesis is to be put aside for some other critical operation, only that it is inseparable from processes of evolution—an in-built capacity for translation we have developed—and is perhaps all we really have at hand for critical interdisciplinary work.

Saunders tells us that Lux “encourages readers to employ their evolved mind-reading ability—a theory of mind calibrated, ineluctably, to the human mind—as a tool for interpreting the mental worlds of animal species that are physiologically and cognitively very different from Homo sapiens” (58). She tells us that “he invites us to regret our entrapment in subjective modes of apprehension” (69). And she would urge us to repeat the exercise in spite of the origins of this peculiar form of fitness adapted to survival. Thus my earlier point concerning the different textual ecologies of the present issue, and an “evolved cognitive specialization” (56). I will exercise further to stage an encounter with the work of Korean artist Haegue Yang, which features on our front and back covers. Entering into dialogue with Lux’s texts and Yang’s installations are very different problems, but it seems to me that the same basic evolutionary mechanisms that Saunders describes are crucially at work. Before going into this, allow me to introduce the other excellent essays in the issue.

Philip McGowan’s carefully shaped essay, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Work of Fire,” opens the issue. Out of allegorical obscurity, the author brings into visibility an elemental reading of Bishop’s 1947 poem “At the Fishhouses.” Using preliminary drafts of the poem, against the backdrop of psychoanalysis and religion, and with the aid of extrinsic sources, McGowan centres his analysis on a unique form of repetition, showing that for Bishop the work of fire is performed by water. In “Finster’s Finger: The Trans-Generational Art of Howard Finster,” Eyal Amiran performs an exceptional set of readings of select works by Howard Finster. Foregoing the easy temptation to read specific objects, places, or events in Finster’s version of American folk art as forensic evidence, Amiran turns his attention to a pattern of...