‘I can feel it’. HAL 9000, the supercomputer at the centre of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), makes this claim to emotional sensitivity moments before its higher functions are terminated by astronaut Dave Bowman, the sole surviving human aboard…
View More The Electronic Heart
In his essay ‘Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust’ Joseph Litvak discusses a tendency among marginalised youths, and especially among queer ones, to seek solace in the idea of ‘some other place, some other world, magically different from the world of family and school’ (76)…
View More The Metaphorics of Virtual Depth
Every year at 4am on the Monday that follows Ash Wednesday, the street lighting is turned off in the city of Basel, north Switzerland. The “Morgestraich” precession that follows signals the start of the Fasnacht Carnival. During…
View More Incipience and the Historical Subject
We are used to seeing comics as a succession of neatly ordered panels, each containing images and words that combine together to tell a story. In my last paper for Alluvium, ‘Panel Transitions in Trauma Comics,’ (Alluvium Vol. 2, No. 1…
View More Comics and Page Bleeds
‘#MargaretThatcher’s ousting from Downing Street described on R4 in terms of a great Shakespearean tragedy #Shakespeare’, ‘Spotting #Shakespeare paraphrases in #FreshMeat’, ‘C4’s tribute to Richard Briars…
View More Shakespeare on Television, this Millennium
The hypodermic syringe has had a profound impact upon the administration of medicine and upon non-medicinal/recreational drug use since it was first marketed in the 1850s. Here, I investigate early depictions…
View More Hypodermics at the fin-de-siècle
Even before her death, Margaret Thatcher was a figure who seemed to prompt visions of haunting and exorcism. She was a curse whose effects were still felt…
View More Thatcher’s Legacies: Editor’s Introduction
Democracy, Franco Moretti once declared, is not interested in the production of good novels (1987: 192). It is not self-evident that parliamentary politics should…
View More Margaret Thatcher in the 21st Century
When we remember, represent or consume the recent past, we often do so through the alluring prism of nostalgia. In Ali Smith’s short story ‘astute, fiery, luxurious’…
View More The Allure of the 1980s
Margaret Thatcher once claimed that her greatest legacy was New Labour: the refashioning of the old enemy in her own image. The implications of this are still…
View More Utopia Loops, Ghost Legacies