In this first 2020 issue of Alluvium, articles converge around conflicting understandings of our sense of self in the neoliberal contemporary. At a particularly ‘uncertain’ time in which the concept of the national bloc is becoming all-the-more contested as a locus of identity, where do we seek alternative forms of identification and affiliation?
View More Alluvium Editorial 8.1
In the previous issue of Alluvium, Christine Lehnen wrote about the possibilities and limitations of post-national literature in Europe in the 21st century. As part of an ongoing research project, she is conducting expert interviews with practitioners to explore their stance on nationality and how it shapes (or fails to shape) their writing.
View More Post-National Authors, Post-National Literature? An Interview with David Szalay
The perennial popularity of films, mini-dramas, and documentary-style TV shows depicting serial killers reflects the symbiotic state between production and our fascinated consumption. As a culture, it seems we return to the scenes of violent and notorious crimes compulsively. Mark Seltzer implies the extent of our interest in this particular configuration of masculinity when he writes that representations of the serial killer and serial murder ‘have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture’ (1).
View More Returning to the Scene: Seriality and the Serial Killer in Mindhunter (2017-)
A striking demand of many theoretical texts which engage with the formal aspects of media is the importance of paying attention.
View More Highlighting Invisible Media: Television Subtitles in the Split-Attention Economy
‘New Research on American Literature and Neoliberalism’ (organised by Arin Keeble) was held at Edinburgh Napier University on the 9th December 2019. This symposium included eight papers over two panels, and launched six new books focused around American literature in the neoliberal age: Diletta De Cristofaro’s The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times (2020); Paul Crosthwaite’s The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (2019); Myka Tucker-Abramson’s Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism (2019); Arin Keeble’s Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context: Literature, Film and Television (2019); Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro’s Neoliberalism and American Literature (2019); and Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro’s World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent (2019).
View More Conference Review: New Research on American Literature and Neoliberalism