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Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

Alluvium Editorial 10.1

This special issue is dedicated to papers presented at the biennial BACLS “What Happens Now?” Conference that took place on 2-3 September 2021. The conference focused on representing a variety of concerns and topics represented in contemporary literature studies, and these are reflected in the articles published in this issue: they address the intersections between literary studies, video games and television series, pertinent questions of representation and identity in contemporary literature, as well as exploring the political and social formations of the present through critical and creative methods.

Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

Ambiguity and Parapraxis: Serially Reframing Trauma in “Peaky Blinders”

Susanne Köller April 29, 2022 No Comments historical fiction narrative complexity Seriality Television trauma

Peaky Blinders serially and cumulatively critiques and subverts the (narrative) troping of trauma, both regarding its genesis and continuity/persistence, by diversifying and complicating its central properties and classifications in what, I argue, amounts to a parapractic approach to both trauma and historical fiction.

Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

Failure: The Ghost and the Mother

Anna Johnson April 29, 2022 No Comments creative writing failure motherhood queer theory spectrality

In this essay, I will explore the connection between failure, haunting and structures of power, and of care, by talking about the shared failures of the ghost and the mother. My wider research proposes parallels between the figure of the ghost and the (figurative and real) mother. I see many of these parallels as present in the ‘failures’ (I can’t stress the inverted commas enough) that I believe these figures end up sharing, and this will be my focus here.

Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

“New year, new data”: Percival Everett’s Telephone, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, and the Future of the “Affective Turn”

George Kowalik April 29, 2022 No Comments affective turn Choose Your Own Adventure post-postmodernism STEM research

This article will consider Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” – which “chronologically coincides with the end of the postmodernism debates” (Smith, 424) – through the lens of two American novels published in 2020: Percival Everett’s Telephone and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. Stylistically, these novels are quite different, and I will discuss them individually as well as unpack their similarities, examining their mutual relevance to contemporary fiction’s affective renewal.

Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

Affect, Minecraft and Neoliberal Techno-Utopianism in Keith Stuart’s “A Boy Made of Blocks”

Holly Parker April 29, 2022 No Comments affect theory Keith Stuart Neoliberalism Utopianism videogames

. This essay interrogates how the novel tackles cultural perceptions of ASD and how Sam’s representation interlinks with the novel’s representation of neoliberalism. It will primarily argue that Stuart’s depiction of Alex and Sam’s performances as avatars both critiques and simultaneously subscribes to aspects of post-millennial neoliberalist society, engaging specifically with dispossession, self-help culture, career-centricity, and the focus on “family” (Stephen Crossley, 2016).

Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

“Being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again”: Literary Empathy in Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy

Craig McDonald April 29, 2022 No Comments autofiction empathy Rachel Cusk

Contrary to claims that autofiction rejects the goal of generating empathy, I will posit that Cusk’s works instead aim to produce what James Dawes calls “literary empathy.” Literary empathy, Dawes writes, does not necessarily advance human rights or overtly political goals, and “does not point past the reader,” but instead “points to the reader,” allowing readers to question their own capacity to empathise (431).

Issue 10.1 - Special Conference Issue "What Happens Now? 2021" Previous Issues

Indiana as Islamistan: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Crystal Maritta Sam April 29, 2022 No Comments hybridity US Literature

As a subject of inquiry among geographers, historians and literary theorists (among others), place has a variety of discordant yet non-exhaustive definitions which are constantly challenged and redefined. Human geographers, including Yi Fu Tuan and Edward Relph, insist that place is never merely an object or a specific location.

Issue 9.6 Previous Issues

Alluvium Editorial 9.6

Emma Catan, Franca Leitner and Sofie Schrey December 13, 2021 No Comments gender identity Otherness race

By Emma Catan, Franca Leitner and Sofie Schrey In this final Alluvium issue of 2021, we explore a variety of perspectives on topical themes in…

Issue 9.6 Previous Issues

“I live with doubleness”: Non-Binary Gender Identity and Othering in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story

Kit Schuster December 13, 2021 No Comments gender identity Neo-Victorian othering transgender identity

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein already introduces this issue of the nature of being and the core of our subjectivity. In Frankissstein’s source text, Frankenstein’s creature, an outsider in his society, raises the question of what makes someone human, what is considered monstrous, and who has the prerogative of deciding on the answers. As such, it has traditionally been read as “a representation of [marginalisation] and [victimisation], of binding cultural construction” (Mossman, no pg.).

Issue 9.6 Previous Issues

Reading Hybridity: Metafiction and Dystopia in Wayne Holloway’s Bindlestiff

Liam J. L. Knight December 13, 2021 No Comments critical race theory dystopian fiction hybridity metafiction

Wayne Holloway’s Bindlestiff (2019) is a metafictional novel because it ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact’ (Waugh 2). It is chiefly that novel’s formal hybridity that self-reflexively highlights its constructedness, for Bindlestiff blends prose fiction with screenplay.