Project MUSE®: Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 44 (2011) through current issueLatest Articles: Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journalTWOProject MUSE®Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal1925-56830027-1276Latest articles in Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987213
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Mosaic 56.2 is a general issue. It opens with Yanbin Kang’s wonderful essay on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s poetry is enough to make anyone feel happy, fulfilled, and at peace with the universe. We find out why in Kang’s essay, “Dickinson’s Dew, Concentrated Casualness, and Emersonian Dao.” With special attention to the influence of Emerson and a few of Dickison’s singular subjects of attention, poems to a flower, dew, the spider, a pebble, the robin, and jay each unfold as a union with nature that Kang would have us entertain through an Asian aesthetics of no-mind and self-emptying. The author shows us how this poetics is materialized in Dickinson’s often scrappy, loose-leaf manuscript pages and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-04-16text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®367332026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Dickinson’s Dew, Concentrated Casualness, and Emersonian Dao
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987214
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A growing body of “Global Dickinson” is emerging in Dickinson studies. Notably, the 2013 special issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal, “Pearls in Eastern Waters: Dickinson and Asia,” examined her reception outside of America and her relationships to non-Western cultures. Publications in the EDJ and elsewhere by scholars such as Adam Katz, Tom Patterson, and myself showcase a critical mass of interpretive energy that thematically links her verses to Daoism and Chan Buddhism. As a part of this effort, my writings over a decade explore how Chinese readers contribute to a new understanding of Dickinson by reading her creatively through a lens of Dao and Chan. Most recently, I extend the inquiry to how Dickinson’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallDickinson’s Dew, Concentrated Casualness, and Emersonian Dao2026-04-16text/htmlen-USDickinson’s Dew, Concentrated Casualness, and Emersonian Dao2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®930382026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Dark Inoculation: Death and the Uncanny in Celan’s Later Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987215
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Beginning with Breathturn (Atemwende, 1967), Paul Celan’s poems enter what he calls the “pale-voiced / flayed from the depths” (“Fahlstimmig, aus / der Tiefe geschunden”; Gesammelte Werke [GW] 2: 307).1 The Fahlstimmig (palely voiced) ravaged from the “abyss” radically differs from any aesthetics that gives sensual pleasure or artistic satisfaction. Divested of the musicality and surrealism that characterize his early poetry, Celan’s late voice is close to the demise of a voice in its incessant gasps; it is the voice standing at the “exit / of time” (“Ausgang / der Zeit”; GW 2: 69). A further stylistic reduction from Speech-Grille (Sprachgitter, 1959) and No One’s Rose (Die Niemandsrose, 1963), Celan’s later work
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallDark Inoculation: Death and the Uncanny in Celan’s Later Poetry2026-04-16text/htmlen-USDark Inoculation: Death and the Uncanny in Celan’s Later Poetry2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®763842026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Power, Responsibility, and the Stranger in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987216
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Various critics, including Hilde Staels (978), Winfried Siemerling (106–72), and Milena Marinkova (114–15), have commented, in passing, on the importance of the figure of the stranger in Michael Ondaatje’s oeuvre. Marinkova, for instance, discerns a nexus between shared suffering and the “intimacy between strangers” in The English Patient (114–15), while Laura Savu Walker (49), after noting Ondaatje’s preoccupation with the stranger in The Cat’s Table, contends that a “recognition of and respect for the other’s radical otherness lies at the heart of the ethical vision” in his work (49). My purpose in this essay is to develop this line of thought by showing the importance of the stranger in the articulation of an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallPower, Responsibility, and the Stranger in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table2026-04-16text/htmlen-USPower, Responsibility, and the Stranger in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®619022026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Popular Genres and the Disnarrated in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987217
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“I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.”In a blunt statement made at the very beginning of the first installment of A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–2006), Lemony Snicket forewarns the readers that the narrative they are about to engage with does not follow the familiar plotline characteristically associated with mainstream children’s fiction: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle” (Bad 1). While several scholars have dismissed Snicket’s put-this-book-down adjurations as little more than a marketing ploy (Butt
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallPopular Genres and the Disnarrated in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events2026-04-16text/htmlen-USPopular Genres and the Disnarrated in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®771092026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Beyond the Body: Ekphrastic Embodiment and Material Agency in Ciaran Carson’s Still Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987218
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“I don’t see any firm line between all the things, music, art, poetry,” said Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson in an interview with David Laskowski (97, emph. mine). Eclectic and experimental, Carson’s writing is often noted for blurring the boundaries between media (Alexander 23; McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov 52). Carson was not only an accomplished poet but also a musician and lover of the visual arts. Music and visual media served as sources of inspiration and material for experimentation throughout his literary career, from the early publications in the 1970s to the last poetry collection, Still Life (2019). His first book, The New Estate (1976)—which includes lyric poems centred around everyday life and Irish
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallBeyond the Body: Ekphrastic Embodiment and Material Agency in Ciaran Carson’s Still Life2026-04-16text/htmlen-USBeyond the Body: Ekphrastic Embodiment and Material Agency in Ciaran Carson’s Still Life2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®833642026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Translator: A Shadow in the (Author’s) Cave of Ideas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987219
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With the rise of interdisciplinarity over the past decades, its growth and penetration into the spaces of almost all disciplines resulting in greater and greater diversification, literary studies and criticism have also opened themselves to other disciplines. Gradually, and in some literary quarters somewhat reluctantly, they have entered into a dialogue with translation studies, too, a burgeoning discipline born as late as the second half of the twentieth century. The diversified space at the intersection between literary and translation studies has in time substantially redefined the borders of literary studies. Thus, for example, Marella Feltrin-Morris et al. speak of the impact of translation studies on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallThe Translator: A Shadow in the (Author’s) Cave of Ideas2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Translator: A Shadow in the (Author’s) Cave of Ideas2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®761092026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16The Disappearance of Musical Futures?: Multiple Temporalities and Sonic Anachronisms in “New” Music
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987220
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Efforts to create new musical languages and find ways to portray an imaginary future have declined in the twenty-first century. Composers of “art music” and producers of popular music have apparently lost interest in creating works that sound as if they come from the future. Limitations of “new” music have been spotted as early as in the 1950s: Adorno wrote about an inherent vice of premature aging in contemporary “art music,” to the extent as to disavow his own initial enthusiasm for neue Musik and the innovations fostered by the Darmstadt school. He argued that such music, while claiming to be futuristic and appearing as novelty, was in fact getting old very rapidly. This constitutional wear and tear was not just
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallThe Disappearance of Musical Futures?: Multiple Temporalities and Sonic Anachronisms in “New” Music2026-04-16text/htmlen-USThe Disappearance of Musical Futures?: Multiple Temporalities and Sonic Anachronisms in “New” Music2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®930042026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16Six Popular Music Albums as Allegories of the Future
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987221
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Leveraging the success of the Moroder productions From Here To Eternity and I Feel Love, released the year before, this one-off space disco project by Tangerine Dream’s Peter Baumann, operating under the pseudonym Hacoon Mail, distinctly illustrates the influence of German kosmische Musik on synthesizer-heavy eurodisco. While Moroder and his team imagined the possible sound of the 1990s in I Feel Love (1977), the only leap forward in time in Donna Summer’s otherwise nostalgia-infused LP I Remember Yesterday, the Leda album, like many other works within this subgenre of dance music, consists entirely of allegories of the future. We can also find early occurrences of what Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/536/image/coversmallSix Popular Music Albums as Allegories of the Future2026-04-16text/htmlen-USSix Popular Music Albums as Allegories of the Future2026-04-162026TWOProject MUSE®127522026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-16