. 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).
View More Affect, Minecraft and Neoliberal Techno-Utopianism in Keith Stuart’s “A Boy Made of Blocks”
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).
View More “Being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again”: Literary Empathy in Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy
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.
View More Indiana as Islamistan: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf
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…
View More Alluvium Editorial 9.6
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.).
View More “I live with doubleness”: Non-Binary Gender Identity and Othering in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story
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.
View More Reading Hybridity: Metafiction and Dystopia in Wayne Holloway’s Bindlestiff
Content warning: this article contains discussions and descriptions of sexual violence. By Marni Appleton Within days of publication, Kristen Roupenian’s short story ‘Cat Person’ (2017)…
View More Feeling Straight: Heterosexual Fatigue in ‘Cat Person’
By Misbah Ahmed and C.J. Griffin This issue of Alluvium focuses on World Literature and the alter|native. The featured articles are written in the context…
View More Alluvium Editorial 9.5 – Special Issue: World Literature and the alter|native
By Martin Schauss It’s fair to say that ecocriticism as a literary hermeneutic has moved on from what Greg Garrard called “the poetics of authenticity”…
View More Ecopoetics, Intermediality, and the Language of Caroline Bergvall
Foo Sek Han’s “Extracts from DMZine #13 (January 2115)” (thereafter, “Extracts”) takes the form of zine extracts showcasing life in fictionalised Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, almost twenty years after a cyber-attack in 2098. Zen Cho, the editor of the anthology Cyberpunk: Malaysia (2015) which contains “Extracts”, describes it as a story about revolutions, one that is conscious of the “nation’s failings” but also optimistic about its people’s resilience (Cho, “Intro” 9).
View More Malaysian Speculative Fiction as Alter|native Text