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
There is a line in David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) that is so resonant that its absence is all but unimaginable: ‘To us all and to the North – where we do what we want!’ (Peace 228). In a series of short articles for Alluvium I use the malevolence and pathos of this line – a toast drunk by corrupt police officers to a chimerical space which, as Christopher …
View More Original Modern or a New Kind of Ordinary?