Alluvium Editorial 9.6
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…
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 9.6Mary 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 StoryWayne 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 BindlestiffContent 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’Alluvium 9.4 Special Issue: World Literature and the Alter|native Guest edited by Misbah Ahmed, Zahra Bazm Ara and Chris Griffin Writing in 1992, Kamau Brathwaite…
View More Call for PapersIn the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Irish literature has been marked by a seemingly unprecedented proliferation of writing by women. From Sally Rooney’s global domination on bestseller lists to Anna Burns’ Booker Prize win, Irish women’s writing is flourishing within and without the borders of the island. This special issue focusing on twenty-first century Irish women’s writing emerges out of a desire to survey and interrogate this literary fecundity.
View More Alluvium Editorial 9.1: Twenty-First Century Irish Women’s WritingBy 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|nativeBy 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 BergvallFoo 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 TextThe After Oil Research Collective argue that ‘a genuine global transition away from fossil fuels will require not only a reworking of our energy infrastructures, but a transformation of the petroculture itself’ (After Oil, 9). In this statement, the collective refer to how petroculture has come to shape values, feelings, and societal norms. Petroculture is a field that argues that energy, and crude oil in particular, has shaped the social and cultural imaginary of the twenty first century. Their argument is that a cultural and societal transition must take place to conceive of a future free from present violent and imperialist modes of resource extraction.
View More Energy Futures, Science Fiction, and the Failure of MasteryKamau Braithwaite’s concept of the ‘alter|native’ is defined in his essay ‘Caliban’s Guarden as the alteration of the nature of our shared consciousness, which has been shaped in response to colonial subjugation (4). When we consider the alter|native in conjunction with World Literature’s concerns with the marginalised in a global system, we can see how it is coterminous with postcolonial struggles that seek to reclaim lost histories and identities.
View More The Impossibility of Nativising MarginalityThough not originally intended as such, this issue unites its articles under a thematic umbrella of highlighting underrepresented voices and genres. These articles discuss works of writing that are not widely represented within our received canon, whether such under-representation pertains to the kinds of stories they tell, social groups they foreground, or genres they occupy.
View More Alluvium Editorial 9.4