contemporary literature

Issue 9.2 Previous Issues

Alluvium Editorial Issue 9.2

In this March issue of Alluvium, our articles draw together a variety of scholars at varying stages of their academic careers. Breaking down elements of contemporary cinema and literature, this issue addresses topics of feminism, colonialism and metafiction, terrorism, and implicit rape across a selection of texts and cinema. This month’s collection of articles is a celebration of the contemporary, and an insight into the future of literature and media studies.

Issue 8.2 - Special Issue "Locating the Centre in Contemporary Literature" Previous Issues

Alluvium Editorial 8.2: Locating the Centre in Contemporary Literature

Daniel South and Lola Boorman July 13, 2020 No Comments centre Centrist politics compromise aesthetics contemporary literature grammar Liberalism political ideologies

This special issue of Alluvium takes as its subject contemporary literature’s relationship with the political centre. The editors remind us that there is more than one answer to this question. Indeed, locating this ideological ground is in part so difficult because of the constantly shifting discursive environment concerning centrism, and its relationship with both the left and the right.

Issue 8.2 - Special Issue "Locating the Centre in Contemporary Literature" Previous Issues

Now “The Fact That” Then

Hannah Karmin July 13, 2020 No Comments Attention economy contemporary literature Crisis literature experimental literature

This article examines the dissolution of the centre as a fecund literary frame of reference. Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” (2019) is a novel that is written on the precipice of crisis. It is an experimental novel of (mostly) one sentence that documents a contemporary crisis of distraction so engrossing that we do not have time to acknowledge its magnitude.

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CfP Alluvium 7.6: Contemporary Storytelling and Seriality

Caroline Wintersgill August 27, 2019 No Comments contemporary literature serialised narrative storytelling

Alluvium is an open access journal featuring short essays of around 2000 words on key issues and emerging trends in 21st century writing and criticism. The…

Issue 5.1 Previous Issues

Caring about things in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold

Ruth Charnock January 5, 2016 No Comments anthropology of the present Bill Brown contemporary culture contemporary literature Heidegger Jennifer Egan Lacan object Shame Silvan Tomkin Siri Hustvedt thing theory thingness

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…

Issue 5.1 Previous Issues

Duration Without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen Against the Clock

Richard Martin January 5, 2016 1 Comment acceleration boredom Catherine Régulier Christian Marclay cinema consumerism contemporary culture contemporary literature digital culture Don DeLillo Henri Lefebvre homogenisation media Rhythmanalysis Shame spectatorship Steve McQueen The Clock time Zadie Smith

‘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 …

Issue 5.1 Previous Issues

Re-imagining Bluebeard’s Wives: Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox

Heidi Yeandle January 5, 2016 No Comments Angela Carter Bluebeard contemporary culture contemporary literature Daphne du Maurier doubling fairy tale Helen Oyeyemi humiliation identity crisis literary adaptation literary canon Margaret Atwood marriage masculine power murder punishment rivalry sisterhood Ted Hodgkinson

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 …

Issue 5.1 Previous Issues

Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World: Does Art Have a Gender Identity?

Diana Wagner January 5, 2016 1 Comment art Bakhtin bias contemporary culture contemporary literature gender identity Hegel ideology manipulation mask perception self self-consciousness sexual bias sexuality Siri Hustvedt stereotype

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 …

Issue 4.3 Previous Issues

Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature

Raphael Kabo June 26, 2015 No Comments Arcade Fire contemporary culture contemporary literature Edgelands Gareth E. Rees genre study geocriticism Ian Sinclair Karl Hyde Laura Oldfield Ford liminality literary geocriticism London Olympics Lorde Nick Papadimitriou Patrick Keiller spatiality Susan Sontag taxonomy

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 …

Issue 4.2 Previous Issues

Editorial – Global Conflict

Daniel O' Gorman May 13, 2015 No Comments Amnesty International Baudrillard Child soldier civilians contemporary fiction contemporary literature Dave Eggers dissociation drone Edward Said George Brant global conflict Goretti Kyomuhendo IDP imprisonment Internally displaced persons Joseph Kony Judith Butler Kevin Power Levinas LRA Obama space Sudanese civil war Teju Cole torture trauma UNHCR US soldier World Food Programme

Contemporary fiction about global conflict is often concerned with an imaginative collapsing of space. Putting emotional affect to instrumental use, it works to raise awareness about events that go untold by the world’s media, either challenging conventional understandings of…