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HIGH-LIGHTS

ANDRÉE-ANNE BOISVERT,

MOSAIC’S PRODUCTION MANAGER

HIGHLIGHTS

June 2015

David Farrell Krell’s visit in October 2013In October 2013, Mosaic and UMIH were honoured to host David Farrell Krell, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distin-guished Visiting Professor of German Studies at Brown University, for an open public seminar entitled “Recal-citrant Arts: Translation, Scholarship, Zoography, Fiction.” Dr. Krell discussed the art and act of writing across genres, translating, biography, and Jacques Derrida’s work on the animal.

Nicholas Royle’s visit in October 2013In October 2013, Mosaic welcomed distinguished lecturer Nicholas Royle to the University of Manitoba. Dr. Royle is the author of several key theoretical texts, including Telepathy and Literature (1991), The Uncanny (2003), Jacques Derrida (2003), and Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), in addition to his creative work, which includes the novel Quilt (2010) and his creation of the Quick Fictions app, launched in June 2012. Dr. Royle is also the co-editor of the Oxford Literary Review and Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

Dr. Royle’s visit to campus included a public lecture entitled “Quick Fiction: Some Remarks on Writing Today,” in which he addressed the problem of the short attention span and asked whether it is a problem or is instead simply a product of the changeable nature of our times. His lecture also underscored that quick fiction does not necessarily mean poor fiction and that more concise writing can be alive, vigorous, and vibrant. Dr. Royle also led a seminar focused on his novel Quilt, enabling participants to explore relationships

between writing and mourning and between human beings and animals.

Mosaic was honoured to publish, as part of its “Crossings” series, an original interview conducted by Dr. McCance with the participation of three of the journal’s graduate student interns: Karalyn Dokurno, Ryan Fics, and Riley McGuire. You can read the interview, which addresses some of Dr. Royle’s earlier critical influences and his experi-ences in education, in the March 2014 issue of Mosaic (47.1).

Timothy Morton delivers 2015 Warhaft Memorial LectureIn February 2015 Dr. Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice Univer-sity, led a graduate student round table discussion of his book Hyperobjects (2013), entitled “The Anthropocene: Tactics for Understanding it in the Hu-manities.” Dr. Morton was also invited to deliver the lecture “On Ecological Touching: Knowing (as) Intimacy” as the University of Manitoba 2015 Sidney Warhaft Memorial Lecturer. The lecture challenged audience members to con-sider new approaches to understanding the scope and magnitude of objects and how we relate to them. Mosaic supports the Warhaft Lecture and was pleased to participate in the event.

“Photography and Voice” panel invites interdisciplinary dialogue In March 2014, Dr. Shepherd Steiner, Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba School of Art and new member of Mosaic’s Editorial Board, proposed an interdisciplinary panel to consider photography and voice. The panel brought together Dr. Steiner; Dr. Sarah Ciurysek, Assistant Professor of Photography, Video, and Installation in the School of Art; Herbert Enns, Professor of Architecture, Director of the Experimental Media Research Group, and Chair of Mosaic’s Edito-rial Board; and Dr. Dawne McCance, Distinguished Professor of Religion and Editor of Mosaic.

H. Peter Steeves “rocks out” at Mosaic’s lifedeath conferenceEverything about H. Peter Steeves’s multi-dimensional, collaborative presentation defied the expectations for a standard keynote lecture. “This Life, This Death, This Animal—Again” was a playful and profound consider-ation of language, relationality, and the inescapable subject/object divide. Dr. Steeves strummed a guitar and sang while Danielle Meijer of DePaul University performed a number of traditional dances.

Elisabeth Weber gives keynote lecture about philosophy and crueltyPart of the A matter of lifedeath con-ference, Dr. Weber gave her keynote presentation on the “living death” of state-sponsored violence committed in the Middle East. Through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s and Fethi Benslama’s theorizations on cruelty, Weber’s key-note addressed the “war on terror” and

analyzed the media’s habitual erasure of death through “high-tech” forms of cruelty, including remote-controlled drone strikes perpetrated by the United States. With insight and care, Dr. Weber mapped out the relationship between deaths that are “anesthetized” and “surgical” in their delivery from a removed space, at the push of a button, and the terror felt by those who know that death can come from anywhere, at any moment, impersonal and arbitrary in its distribution. Speaking of cruelty, humanity, life, and death, Weber’s dis-course was powerful and memorable.

Maria De Stefano joins the journal as Business Manager Mosaic is very pleased that Maria De Stefano joined the team in September 2013 as Business Manager. Maria’s experience and personality have shone through since her start at the journal and she played a key role in ensuring that Mosaic’s lifedeath conference became the success that it was. Maria comes to Mosaic after working in the Dean’s Office at the Asper School of Business. Maria has twenty years of business administration experience and really enjoys the atmosphere and challenge that working at a busy literary journal provides. Mosaic is both happy and privileged to have Maria De Ste-fano as part of its professional team.

Triginally from Montreal, Andrée-Anne studied at McGill University before moving to Winnipeg to take her MA

in English at the University of Manitoba. She worked as a freelance editor on projects that include water resources management, drought research, and Franco-Manitoban fiction before joining Mosaic in 2011.

COLLABORATION

WITH UMIH BRINGS DEAN IRVINE TO U OF M

he University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities (UMIH) and Mosaic regularly collaborate to invite researchers to lecture on scholarly publishing and digital humanities. In February

2015, UMIH and Mosaic hosted Dr. Dean Irvine, Director of the Editing Modernism in Canada project and Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University. In his public lecture “Laboratories of Modernity: Collaboration, Repatriation, and Digital Technologies,” Dr. Irvine discussed the history of laboratory-based research in the arts and humanities, salvage ethnography, and digital anthropology. Dr. Irvine also participated in the all-day digital humanities workshop “Digital Editions,” during which participants learned best practices for the production of online scholarly multimedia editions. The workshop focused on the Modernist Commons project (modernistcommons.ca), a digital repository and modular editorial workbench.

SPOTLIGHT:

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quick fiction does not necessarily mean poor fiction; more concise writing can be alive, vigorous, and vibrant.”

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HIGH-LIGHTS

MOSAIC’S STUDENT INTERN PROGRAM

FEATURE ISSUE ON M I C H A E L N A A Sn December 2014, Mosaic published issue 47.4, which in-cludes a collection of essays that investigate gender, language systems, migratory modes, and more. The issue features

scholar Michael Naas and highlights his new work on Hélène Cixous. As a preface to his layered discussion of Cixous in the essays “Flicker 1: Reflections of Photography and Literature in the Works of Hélène Cixous” and its sequel, “Flicker 2: Reflections on Cinematography and Literature in the Works of Hélène Cixous,” Mosaic is pleased to also pub-lish Dr. Dawne McCance’s in-depth interview with Dr. Naas.

The interview took place in Chicago in the summer of 2014 and highlights the major influence Derrida’s work has had on Dr. Naas’s own work, as well as revealing the depth of Dr. Naas’s scholarly interest in Derrida’s seminars, including his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. The interview chronicles a very exciting moment in Naas’s own distinguished career, just prior to the release of his book The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments (2014), a book that has been well received by the academic community and entrenches Naas as one of the preeminent Derrida scholars writing today.

osaic believes in supporting the growth of developing scholars and so maintains a team of dedicated student interns drawn this year from the departments of English, Film, and Theatre and Religion, both of which collaborate in funding the intern program. These students assist the

journal’s core staff with daily editorial operations. Although Mosaic must occasionally part with dedicated interns, the journal has on these occasions an equal opportunity to welcome new ones.

Karalyn DokurnoKaralyn Dokurno is a third-year PhD candidate who studies notions of movement, exile, and “home” in early modern literature. Currently her work involves tracing these themes in the writings of Jesuit missionaries from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and North America. She is in her third year of working at Mosaic, where her primary tasks have involved proofreading upcoming issues and organizing the A matter of lifedeath conference, during which she also presented a paper entitled “Fear and Martyrdom in the Work of Robert Southwell and ‘Upon the Image of Death’.” Working at Mosaic has been and continues to be an incredibly rewarding experience for her, allowing her to interact with other students who are interested in academia and publishing and providing her with an interdisciplinary environment in which to further consider her own deeply interdisciplinary work.

Katelyn Dykstra DykermanKatelyn is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre who has worked at Mosaic for almost two years. Her research focuses on representations of the medical treatment of intersex bodies in twenty-first-century literature. More broadly, she is interested in the ways in which queer bodies interact with and are touched by medical theory and practice. Katelyn’s interdisciplinary work is augmented by her work at Mosaic, where she values the opportunity to proofread new academic work and broaden the peer reviewer pool. Both tasks allow her to engage with exciting scholarship that may not have otherwise come to her attention. She also finds immense value in the working environment at Mosaic, where she is continuously inspired by this group of intelligent and dedicated people.

David HuttenDavid is in the fourth and final year of a Double Honours degree in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre and the Department of Religion. His main areas of focus are the influential writings of Jacques Derrida as well as historical and contemporary Eastern philosophical and traditional studies. Particular areas of interest for David are literary texts that challenge modern (particularly Western) foundations and thinking. David most appreciates critical works that provide methodologies that critique the often oppositional or dualistic logic of modern and contemporary societies as they have developed through philosophical heritages of early modern humanist and enlightenment discourses. David feels honoured by the opportunity to intern at Mosaic. The academic culture and content of the journal provide David with an environment that supplements his studies in a professional and intellectually stimulating way by giving him access to interesting and current interdisciplinary scholars and their work, as well as helping him to improve his own writing and researching techniques.

Jeremy R. StrongJeremy R. Strong is a first-year PhD candidate in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre, where he studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film in its intersections with public policy. He is particularly interested in apocalyptic, dystopian, and disaster narratives that depict the future through logical extrapolation and in any policy that is written in a similar fashion, as well as policy documents and literary texts that unveil shifting attitudes within Canadian culture. Jeremy is keenly interested in the emerging field of critical posthumanism for the productive discourses it allows literary criticism to engage in about identity, including but not limited to individual, collective, local, national, and global senses of self. He is thrilled that he has been given the opportunity to intern at Mosaic, as the academic rigour and intellectually stimulating environment of the journal motivate his own approaches to his research and inspire his writing.

Bruce ConanBruce recently completed his MA in Religion. His thesis, “Critical Non-dualistic Theories of Em-bodiment: Autoimmunity, Psychosomatics, Dorsal-ity,” engages with animal studies, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, and with David Wills’s concept of dorsality in order to explore the variegated ap-proaches to embodiment within the biological sci-ences. Bruce worked for Mosaic for four years and helped plan two international conferences.

Riley McGuireThe PhD program in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania will be Riley’s home away from home for the next four years. Mosaic is happy that Riley was able to return to Winnipeg to participate in the lifedeath confer-ence, during which he presented his paper “Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating Reproduction and Negation in The Hunger Games” and joined his friends at Mosaic in seeing the conference he worked hard to help plan and organize come to a successful close.

Ryan FicsRyan is currently undertaking the first year of PhD study at Emory University in the Depart-ment of Comparative Literature, working with the renowned scholar Geoffrey Bennington. He pre-sented his paper “‘To Live the Death of the Other’: Thinking Through Animality in Derrida and Hei-degger” at the lifedeath conference in October and gave the closing remarks for the conference.

RECENT INTERN UPDATE:

“The student intern program has become crucial to Mosaic: beyond proofreading

every issue of the journal, interns assist in planning conferences, writing and

distributing Calls for Papers, research, and promotional campaigns. It is a

privilege to work with such a bright and dedicated group of students and staff.

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June 2015

– D R . D A W N E M C C A N C E , E D I T O R A N D D I S T I N G U I S H E D P R O F E S S O R

June 2015

208 Tier Building University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3T 2N2

t: 204.474.9763 f: 204.474.7584

mosaic@umanitoba.ca

umanitoba.ca/mosaic

n October 1-4, 2014, Mosaic hosted its fourth international conference, A matter of lifedeath, at the University of Manitoba. This interdisciplinary event brought together scholars from around the world to discuss non-oppositional approaches

to thinking relations between life and death, human and animal, animate and in-animate, presence and absence, the humanities and the sciences. Conference-goers took in presentations and interactions with five renowned keynote speakers: Andrea Carlino, from the University of Geneva’s Institut d'Histoire de la Médecine et de la Santé; Françoise Dastur, from the Archives Husserl at the École Normale Supérieure; David Palumbo-Liu, from the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University; H. Peter Steeves, from the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University; and Elisabeth Weber, from the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This four-day event allowed for interactions between graduate students and estab-lished researchers and scholars from around the world. Panels at the conference repre-sented the variety of possible critical approaches to the complex themes invited by the term lifedeath and yielded some surprising congruencies between fields of research. One example was the panel “Lifedeath in the Wake of Blanchot: Three Variations on the ‘Already Dead’,” in which Laura Zebuhr presented the paper “The Lives of Stones in Thoreau’s Philosophy,” Cory Stockwell discussed “Prophecy and Revolution in von Trier’s Melancholia,” and Sarah Clift ended with “Grave Departures: Melancholic Materiality in W. G. Sebald’s ‘Max Ferber.’” All sessions provided strong evidence of the current scholarly interest in rethinking difference in non-oppositional and non-violent ways.

Mosaic will publish three special conference proceedings issues in 2015, the journal’s 48th year. Dr. Dawne McCance, Editor of Mosaic, would like to thank all those who participated and helped to organize A matter of lifedeath, and was pleased to host so many active and upcoming scholars from around the globe.

ince Mosaic’s last newsletter, nine issues have been released. These include six general issues and three special issues. Together the issues

gather a diversity of critical conversation, theory, and textual interpretation, including original Mosaic interviews with Nicholas Royle, author of Quilt (2010) and The Uncanny (2011), and with Michael Naas, author of several books and co-translator (with Pascale-Anne Brault) of a number of Jacques Der-rida’s books, including The Other Heading (1992), Memoirs of the Blind (1993), Adieu – to Emmanuel Levinas (1999), and Athens, Still Remains (2010).

Also spanning the breadth of these nine issues are essays by Marjorie C. Allison, Martha C. Carpentier, John J. Corso, Philip Dickinson, H. Peter Steeves, Mark Pat-erson, Lynn Hughey Engelbert, Jonathan A. Allan, Sarah Jamieson, Zachary Lamm, Laci Mattison, Todd McGowan, Heather Milne, Susan Petit, Lisa F. Signori, Daniel Thomières, Deborah Wills, and Graham Wolfe, to name just a few.

Mosaic is proud of the diverse range of essays published over the past two years, en-gaging such topics as the thematics of “the hand,” electronic textuality, melancholia, race, speculative fiction, the city, realism, trauma, selfhood, witnessing, poetics, eth-ics, biopolitics, rhetoric, aesthetics, metaphysics, cosmopolitanism, sovereignty, and more. Please visit our website to investigate issues that interest you and subscribe to Mosaic to ensure you receive the best interdisciplinary literary criticism delivered right to your door. Here are some highlights of Mosaic’s most recent issues:

BLINDNESS 46.3 (SEP. 2013)

This special issue includes colour images, drawings, and ten essays on seeing and blindness. The issue broaches such topics as blindness and intimacy, scotoma, sense substitution, aesthetic blindness, visualizing disability, empathy, animal’s eyes, and “the blind bard.” The issue begins with an H. Peter Steeves essay on blindness, leading into a wide range of studies of the sense in question. The issue features seven remarkable drawings by Canadian visual artist Heather Spears.

FEATURING: NICHOLAS ROYLE 47.1 (MAR. 2014)

Nicholas Royle has had an enormous influence on literary and critical theory. In this is-sue, a detailed interview with the author of Quilt and inventor of the Quick Fictions app provides some insight into his approaches to both theory and writing. Two original essays by Royle are printed here for the first time. The issue also collects essays ranging in focus from Orwell to memory, spectrality, and the semiotic square. Be sure to read an expanded feature about Dr. Royle’s visit on page two of this newsletter.

FEATURING: MICHAEL NAAS 47.4 (DEC. 2014)

Highlighting scholar Michael Naas’s influences and his writing, this issue brings together his work on Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and photography and cinematography. The issue also includes essays about graphic text, gender, and language systems.

ROMANCE 47.2 (JUNE 2014)

This special issue engages the rich history of the word “Romance,” with essays on “the romantic,” the roman, romantic fiction, Romanticism, “the Romantics,” and the state of the love story in literature and film. The very definition of the word “Romance” is called into question by unique essays ranging from a focus on James Cameron’s Avatar to the concept of the homicidal romance.

QUEER/AFFECT 48.1 (MAR. 2015)

This issue features essays that elaborate on or interrogate the potential of queer theory’s intervention into affect theory. The essays for this issue were selected for their exploration of non-normative ways of feeling, existing, and relating. Considerations of emotion and expression, trauma theory, and the impact of various affective states (shame, paranoia, hope, desire) also coalesce into Mosaic’s first special issue of 2015.

ISSUES PUBLISHED SINCE OUR LAST NEWSLETTERMosaic’s A matter of lifedeath conference a resounding success

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: LETTERS

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Mosaic invites innovative and interdisciplinary submissions for a special issue on the theme of philosophy’s, literature’s, or any other discipline’s, letters. Tradi-tionally, letters have been regarded as “non-serious” or at least as superfluous to the critical enterprise proper (consider Kant’s division of Plato the letter-writer from Plato the philosophical father). But can letters themselves be considered critical forays and/or keys to the inheritance of scholarly work? Might letters put the serious/non-serious opposition into question? For this special issue, Mosaic encourages submissions that bring letters to light in relation but not limited to the following themes: understanding a writer’s or artist’s body of work; alternate histories; friendship; auto-bio-graphy; archival and digital repository research; email and electronic posting.

MOSAIC FOLLOWS AN ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION PROCESS. IF YOU WOULD LIKE

TO CONTRIBUTE AN ESSAY FOR REVIEW, PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR DETAILS:

WWW.UMANITOBA.CA/MOSAIC/SUBMIT. EMAIL ANY SUBMISSION QUESTIONS TO

MOSASUB@UMANITOBA.CA. SUBMISSIONS MUST BE RECEIVED BY: OCTOBER 16, 2015.