Introduction

Introduction Shepherd Steiner Nordic noir, shame culture, heterotopias, trauma, celebrity, existential angst, dystopian athletics, and a discography: these are the subjects of Mosaic 54.4, a general collection of essays broaching a broad range of topics. In "Vengeance Unbound: Henning Mankell's The Man From Beijing," Daniel McKay tackles the transposition of "Nordic Noir" into a global context, in particular that of the United States and China. The substitutive relationships that follow from this move are read against the background of the consolidation of Neo-Liberal capitalism in the 1990s, in and as the novel's characters, through the decline of Sweden's welfare state, and as the repetitive historical violence of an increasingly rogue system. A light is shined on the intentions of Mankell's crime fiction that is quite extraordinary. And there is spill over, for this is no simple pint at the Oxford Bar on Rose Street with Ian Rankin presiding—all the while conspirators are plotting to overthrow the Crown in the back room. The psychological profiling typical of the whodunnit is replaced by a subtle critique that variously personifies geopolitical players at a crucial conjuncture of capital. Inside/outside relationships, the possibility of a reparative suturing between them, and geographic as much as psychographic deferral occupy Michael Greenstein in "Dynamics of Place: Foucault's Heterotopias in Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault." [End Page v] In a greatly abridged version of a representative passage of his narration of Michaels's novel, Africa and Canada are joined at the hip, the Nile flows into the St. Lawrence, each floods settlements on their respective banks, Charles Dickens usurps the narration, and with the novel's characters moved by the flow as much as its countercurrents—e.g., after a stillbirth Jean longs to be a Nubian woman, her fate like theirs written on her palm—origin and end, birth and death are made inseparably corelative. Capturing and conceptualizing these complex temporal relationships that resonate between one another defy the specificities of identity, geographical site, and history in an imaginative act of mimesis that is at the crux of Greenstein's criticism. In "The Differing Shame Cultures of Tony Williams's Nutcase and Grettir's Saga," Kathryn Hume conjures a wonderous picture of the days of yore. Against this, the comparatist presents two cultures in dialogue and at odds. Both hold up a dark mirror to the immortals, what she describes as "the heroic world" of myth, where "a king or lord sits in a magnificent hall. His warriors feast there perpetually, drinking to the great deeds they mean to do, and the king hands out gold arm bands and swords." On the one hand there is the eleventh century Icelandic loafer, Grettir, and on the other hand there is Aiden the north midlands do-nothing living in a council house. If we should be wary of the echoes of Tonybee, Spengler, and Eliot here, it is difficult not to read Hume's analysis of culture in decline with just a little purchase on our own. So many empty nights without ale and Game of Thrones. "A Traumatic Reading of Maurya's Passivity in Synge's Riders to the Sea" by Chu He presents an embryonic moment of the "Irish trauma play" that turns on a retrospective character study keyed to PTSD. The key moment and question confronted is Maurya's silence as her last son, Bartley, sails out to sea. It is a strange moment in the play, but we all know how death interrupts words, and is also from whence words come. Thus, Maurya's daughter Cathleen asks, "Why wouldn't you give him your blessing and he looking round in the door? Isn't it sorrow enough is on every one in the house without you sending him out with an unlucky word behind him, and a hard word in his ear?" (Synge, Riders 61). In Laurie Vickroy's "'It's More Terrible Not to Remember': Alexievich and Women's War Literature," the author probes the work of Svetlana Alexievich who created a kind of counter archive to official Soviet propaganda grounded in women's history—herstory arrived at through the talking cure. Alexievich sought...

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