Despite the ideals of freedom espoused by Americans a prudish attitude toward sex and sexuality pervades public discourse. From victim blaming to slut shaming, America is simultaneously enthralled and enraged by sex. This complex attitude has been one of the driving forces of avant-garde thought throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries…
View More Everybody Wants Some: Sexual Energy and the American Avant-garde
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag examines the history and development of representing war in photographs. Returning to the earliest images of conflict, she writes: ‘Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what caused this havoc, this carnage – these would be the reactions of a moral monster’ (2003: 7). …
View More Photographing the Flag
When human flesh first touches synthetic flesh in the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” (2013), the human recoils, but keeps touching all the same: “You’re so smooth—how are you so smooth?” whispers Martha (Hayley Atwell) to the android simulacra of her dead partner, Ash (Domnhall Gleeson). The android body is framed as both supernatural and technological, …
View More Fake Flesh: Black Mirror and Ex Machina
In his recent performance at the 2015 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards in June, Los Angeles rapper Kendrick Lamar performed the song ‘Alright’ while standing defiantly upon a defaced police car, an impossibly large United States flag fluttering behind him. The obvious political nature of both the staging and song choice (with lyrics like ‘we hate po-po/Wanna …
View More Kendrick Lamar and the Dialectics of Performing Hip Hop
A week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, was quoted as saying that ‘the end of the age of irony’ had arrived, while Roger Rosenblatt, of Time, wrote: ‘One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony’. The affirmation that irony had died seemed to be confirmed in those first weeks, with many other commentators …
View More 9/11 Fiction and the Death of Irony
In his 1946 essay, ‘Silence,’ the English novelist Aldous Huxley described the twentieth century as ‘the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire – we hold history’s record for them all’ (149). Writers of the early twentieth century saw noise as a symptom and consequence of modernity and modernist writing, as Josh Epstein notes, was ‘infiltrated’ by ‘the sounds of air-raid sirens, trains, typewriters,
View More Loud Fictions: Noise in the Contemporary American Novel
In the 21st century, we remain beholden to the oil economy. Oil shapes our geopolitics, our economic forecasts, the global transportation of our commodities, and impacts upon the costs of day-to-day living. Since the invention of the internal combustion engine, the petroleum industry has risen to such prominence that we cannot understand modern capitalism outside of its history as petro-capitalism …
View More Peak Oil in the Popular Imagination
The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. According to Peter Boxall, there has been a ‘turn in the fiction of the new century’ to reflect this ‘contemporary global condition’ (Boxall 141). This turn is especially pertinent to any discussion of literature from Britain or the United States …
View More A Unified Scene? Global Fictions in the C21
Ali Smith’s There But For The (2011) is about a man who locks himself in the spare room during a dinner party, and stays there for several months. As a plus one guest, Miles Garth’s act of seclusion provides the catalyst for Smith’s ‘scathing social satire’ (Tancke 85) of the Lees and their suburban lifestyle, with, as Ulrike Tancke notes, their main concern relating to the preservation …
View More Celebrity and Surveillance in ‘There But For The’
Susan Sontag, in her 1969 work Styles of Radical Will, claimed that ‘there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see’ (10) – foreseeing with the simplicity of her statement a watershed moment in literary and cultural criticism, the spatial turn, the effects of which are still being comprehended and incorporated into the …
View More Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature