In this issue of Alluvium, four contributors discuss an international variety of texts. What these novels and films all have in common is that their characters deal with adversity, be it through their surrounding society or their own inner lives. As such, their struggles, losses, and triumphs are examined. The four contributions thus come together to reflect on the impact literature can have on the world in criticizing injustices and imagining a better future.
View More Alluvium Editorial 10.2
Irish writer John McGahern stated in an interview with Eamon Maher, “I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts” (Maher 74). McGahern’s second novel, The Dark (1965), takes place in rural mid-century Ireland, with many scenes in the novels correlating to those in his memoir, published in 2005.
View More Shamrock Social Norms: Security, Catholicism, and Shame
The Künstlerroman has seen a resurgence of interest among millennial women writers. Describing novels in which the main character progresses toward the creation of art, the Künstlerroman is the perfect vehicle for metafictional interest in creative production—for instance, in the question of whether the novel can at once be imbricated within the market system and level meaningful aesthetic critique against it.
View More “Something as definitionally useless as art”: Contemporary Women Writers’ Künstlerromane and the Possibility of a Beautiful World
As the Internet fully embeds itself into the daily human experience, we as individuals and society have begun to live in hybrid realities of physical and non-physical communities. The Internet has introduced to humans a new cyber culture. And, saturated in this intangible novelty, we are yet to understand its full effects.
View More Reimagining Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Living in Virtual Spaces and Cyber Autocracy in Hank Green’s “The Carl Saga”
Capitalist Realism is described by Fisher as the capitalist ontology of the post-Fordist era, where capitalism ends in terms of its ability to expand but is so ingrained into the political and cultural imagination that society cannot conceive of anything beyond it (Fisher, Capitalist Realism 1-2). Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent disruptions to economy and culture that revealed systemic problems with neo-liberal economics. Many writers expected this to mark an end to neoliberalism (Skonkwiler & Berge 2), however, political discourse remained unchanging across the spectrum.
View More “Is There No Alternative?”: Capitalist Realism and Genre in Contemporary Political Fiction