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"The present exists as a tension between the way things have always been and the way things ought to be. Myth . . . is all about this dialectic of past and future; it is a narrative whose beginning and ending always inform the middle"

In an article subtitled "Border Writing in Quebec", translation studies scholar Sherry Simon celebrates the contact zone as a creative space where translation and interlingual writing meet.

Ulysses' Gaze starts with images from The Weavers a reel shot by the Manaki brothers, possibly in the 1910's. An old woman is weaving cloth. She stares at the lens not with astonishment but surely with the emotion of facing something new. But is it only her facing a new experience or is it that her image is also new for the contemporary audience? The grainy image has a sense of tangibility that together with the absence of sound provide the static shot with the dreamlike nature of a reality retrieved as if from another world.

And when shall Israel lave her bleeding feet?
And when shall Zion's songs again seem sweet? 
And Judah's melody once more rejoice
The hearts that leap'd before its heavenly voice? 

Tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast, 
How shall ye flee away and be at rest! 
The wild-dove hath her nest-the fox his cave-
Mankind their country-Israel but the grave! 

The author was killed by Roland Barthes in 1968 in the essay "The Death of the Author". This was an act of euthanasia, forming part of a larger poststructuralist project of putting down obdurate rhetorical practices in literature, where the endorsement of myths like authenticity, the representational value of language, the idea of the final analysis, according to Barthes, had unreasonably governed the ways in which literature was written, read and understood.

Our postman, Thanappa, whom we had known as children, old enough to have retired twice over but somehow still in service, was my first visitor for the day…
He was a timeless being. At his favourite corners, he spread out his letters and bags and packets and sat down to a full discussion of family and social matters; he served as a live link between several families, carrying information from house to house… Only before leaving would he remember to give me the letter or book-packet.

The 'Kuleshov Effect' has long been regarded as being both of seminal importance in the development of cinema in the 1920s and yet also as being so ambiguous and difficult to interpret that it has almost become all things to all people. Dana Polan has actually suggested that,

Jean-Luc Godard's incorporation of paintings, comic strip images, and print advertisements in two of his seminal 1960's 'collage' films, Pierrot le fou (1965) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967), prompts a number of intriguing questions concerning the re-presentation and re-contextualization of pre-existing (in this case, mechanically reproduced) images in film and the plastic arts.

t's easy, from the point of view of contemporary theory, to look back on the Enlightenment as that time of philosophical naïveté, when thought was as simple as geometry, when the abstract explained, progress was both a given and goal, truth was equated unproblematically with the Good, and origins were quite simply origins. We imagine that this naïveté required significant complication for ethical, political, or philosophical reasons and that certain myths needed to be revealed for what they are.