Education, a Monstrous Thief of the Future

Long has it been known that the future is cancelled. This doomed fate claimed by Fisher, and indeed others, has only solidified amidst climate crises, right-wing political control, and post-pandemic uncertainty. More and more, it seems that both metaphorically and literally there is no future to come, at least not in the dominant imagination of western politics and culture.1 This is troubling, of course, but not simply because the future has been stolen. It is troubling because something ‘out there’ in the abyss of reality has the agency to steal our futurity. Someone, something, an it, is a thief of time. Temporality has been infected, seized upon and warped; only a monstrous being could do such a thing.

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Conference Review: New Research on American Literature and Neoliberalism

‘New Research on American Literature and Neoliberalism’ (organised by Arin Keeble) was held at Edinburgh Napier University on the 9th December 2019. This symposium included eight papers over two panels, and launched six new books focused around American literature in the neoliberal age: Diletta De Cristofaro’s The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times (2020); Paul Crosthwaite’s The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (2019); Myka Tucker-Abramson’s Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism (2019); Arin Keeble’s Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context: Literature, Film and Television (2019); Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro’s Neoliberalism and American Literature (2019); and Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro’s World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent (2019).

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Pod People: Brave New Worlds of Digital Audio Drama

For the last several months I have been lucky enough to have been on writing sabbatical from my university. As such, I have often found myself around and about my hometown during the day. I feel like I am a strange figure, writing in coffee shops, making enemies of baristas, running errands, and looking, to all but the most enlightened of observers, decadently unemployed. In an effort to stave off the effects of my increasingly sedentary life…

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Departures: The Novel, the Non-Place and the Airport

The term airport novel is something of a misnomer: while the spy novel must by definition involve spying and the historical novel takes readers back into history, airport novels aspire to remove us from the world of the airport. Designed to distract the reader from the boredom…

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