We are delighted to be presenting you with the first new issue of Alluvium, which is relaunching as a graduate-run journal affiliated to the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS).
View More Alluvium Editorial 7.1: RelaunchTag: contemporary culture
Digital Media and the Global Contemporary
Broadly speaking, the early twenty-first century is both increasingly global, and increasingly shaped by digital technology.
View More Digital Media and the Global ContemporaryMapping the Contemporary
An Interview with Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone on publishing The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction.
View More Mapping the ContemporaryIdentifying with Our Contemporaries
If the hype is to be believed, “millennials” have finally found their literary standard-bearer in Irish author Sally Rooney [ …]
View More Identifying with Our ContemporariesContemporary Canonicity (or, what not to read)
Scholarship on the contemporary has a unique relationship to questions of canonicity and value. […]
View More Contemporary Canonicity (or, what not to read)Caring about things in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold
What does it mean to care about things? The Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, dangles this question in a series of set-pieces, moments of glimpsing into the weirdness of the everyday, the objects that fill it and the ways in which these objects are, might, should or shouldn’t be handled. The Blindfold’s objects are animate or border on animation…
View More Caring about things in Siri Hustvedt’s The BlindfoldDuration Without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen Against the Clock
‘There is a bitter and dark struggle around time and the use of time’. Thus wrote Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier in an 1985 article later collected in Lefebvre’s final set of essays, Rhythmanalysis, posthumously published in 1992 (Lefebvre 83). As if the day is not long enough for all our repetitive tasks, the …
View More Duration Without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen Against the ClockRe-imagining Bluebeard’s Wives: Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox
In a Granta Magazine interview with Ted Hodgkinson, Helen Oyeyemi talks about re-writing the endings of canonical texts to suit her own reading of the novel in question. Writing in the margins of library books, Oyeyemi ‘would cross out endings that I didn’t like and I would rewrite them […] I would order everything to …
View More Re-imagining Bluebeard’s Wives: Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr FoxSiri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World: Does Art Have a Gender Identity?
In her most recent novel The Blazing World (2014), Siri Hustvedt raises the problem of sex biases in the art world. One of the central premises of the book is that works of art executed by women are rated significantly lower than the same piece by a man. “Does art really have a gender identity”, asks Hustvedt …
View More Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World: Does Art Have a Gender Identity?Kendrick Lamar and the Dialectics of Performing Hip Hop
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