FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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From Fear and Anxiety to Vulnerable Collective Action: Lucy Kirkwood\u27s The Children
Full text linkIn a seemingly tranquil cottage along the coast, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) delves into the profound anxieties and vulnerabilities arising from an ecological crisis. Set in a post-nuclear disaster Britain, the play follows three retired nuclear scientists grappling with the consequences of their past decisions. Amidst a world in chaos, Kirkwood portrays the fragile relationships and emotional struggles of her characters, reflecting the anxieties prevalent in our own reality. Drawing on affect studies theories—such as Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and “inconvenience,” Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings” and Clare Hemmings’ “affective dissonance”—this analysis explores how these concepts shed light on the characters’ experiences. Berlant’s ideas help us understand the characters’ necessity to adhere to routine as a means to avoid confronting larger, more pressing issues. Ngai’s “ugly feelings” expose the anxiety and discomfort that pervade their lives, while Hemmings’ “affective dissonance” highlights the internal conflicts and moral dilemmas they face. By emphasising these struggles, the play invites audiences to reflect on their own vulnerabilities and consider the need for collective action in the face of adversity. Deliberately refusing catharsis, the play underscores the persistence of unresolved crises, prompting viewers to engage with the issues presented on stage and consider their implications beyond the theatre
“Our American Optimism”: Race, Recognition, and Belonging in Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Full text linkThis paper explores Claudia Rankine’s representation of the feelings of racialisation in her 2004 poetry collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Contextualising this work within wider debates in Afropessimist philosophy, it considers how the poet’s portrayal of emotional pain, depression, and numbness exemplify a form of ‘social death’ instigated by the ubiquitous violence of antiblackness. Through close readings of select sequences, it argues that Rankine frames death as an ongoing structure of African American experience, rather than a singular event. In turn, this paper also considers how her innovative and hybrid “American Lyric” form functions to create a new grammar for Black self-expression in an ostensibly ‘post-race’ culture that obfuscates contemporary systems of racial inequality. It argues that Rankine’s collection cultivates an ethics of attention to the experiences and pain of others, offering poetry as a form of “exhausted hope” to challenge the dehumanising force of White supremacy
Contesting the Prescriptibility of Emotion through Affective Encounters in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012)
Full text linkThis paper explores how Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) dramatises the subversive potentialities of affective encounters as an antidote to the isolating, profit-minded forms of posthumanisation prescribed by modern psychiatry. It argues that the play poignantly unveils how the convergence of the psychopharmaceutical industry with advanced capitalism and neoliberal ideology shape popular discourse around mental illnesses and the necessity of medically induced (self-)regulation of emotion. It also investigates how Prebble mingles crisis with hope in the piece by portraying the autonomy and unpredictability of affective bodily responses, which evade being translated into bio-data and destabilise biopsychiatry’s totalizing view of emotions as utterly controllable through the brain. My analysis utilises Rosi Braidotti’s theorisation of the posthuman subject as both susceptible to exploitation and control and as the site of resistance and ongoing transformation, as presented in her work The Posthuman (2013). It also employs Stefan Herbechter’s theories, as expressed in his book Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), on how biotechnological developments, advanced capitalism and ideology converge, facilitating new forms of self-governmentality. Finally, it refers to Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of affect, prevalent in his work “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) as an intense autonomic bodily response which resists processes of control and manipulation. Ultimately, I argue that The Effect highlights the transformative potential of affective encounters and interconnectedness, functioning as resistance to modern psychiatry’s isolating prescription of emotional self-governance through self-medication
Never/Nor: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hartley Coleridge in Poetry’s Transfictional Worlds
Full text linkThis essay examines the poetry of father and son poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) with respect to the theme of transfictionality, a recent coinage in literary and especially fiction studies. While the term “transfictionality” has lately been used to refer to “the migration of fictional entities across different texts” (Ryan 365; Pearson 113), I suggest this term can also be applied more broadly to refer to texts that are at once mimetic and imaginary. Transfictional can also mean, I suggest, literary content that straddles the line between fact and fiction, i.e., between what is taken to be the \u27real world\u27 and an imaginary setting or ideal transmutation of apparently real content. The two Coleridges, Samuel Taylor and Hartley, both evidence a tendency to produce poetry that is transfictional in this sense, constructing Pantisocracy, an utopian intellectual colony in America, and Ejuxria, an imaginary kingdom based in the English Lake District, as examples of world-building activity that is not entirely based in either fact or fiction, but relies on the commingling of the two. By examining poetic writing that is transfictional as productive of both political and personal poetry, I hope to suggest in part both the transfictional nature of poetry\u27s idealising tendencies, as well as its potential to be a form of world-building writing that should be seen as generically similar to (but still distinct from) narrative forms like prose fiction (especially Sci-Fi/Fantasy) and video games
“Passion, Salomé”: Decadent Transformations and Transgressions of Feminine Sensuality in Huysmans, Wilde, and Strauss
Full text linkRepresentations of Salomé have been hued in the paradoxical characterisations of the beautifully seductive and evil femme fatale. While some artists closely aligned their depictions to this Pandorian stereotype in collusion with narrative traditions of the oppressive male gaze, others challenged it through inventive reimaginations of Salomé, unveiling glimpses of the character’s complex emotive, psychological, and sensual universe that still manages to leave spectators ambivalent and discombobulated today. This article explores the transformations of Salomé in artistic representations of the Decadence across a range of media through a comparative reading of Huysmans’ novel À Rebours (1884), Wilde’s play Salomé (1891) and Strauss’ opera Salomé (1905). The interpretive changes in her characterisations – the femme fatale par excellence, the tragically fated heroine, the transgressive Decadent artist, the self-fulfilled hedonist – uncover a weaponisation of Salomé, transforming her oppressive patriarchal environmental conditions and the sexually objectifying male gaze that have often confined her, to reveal an empowered aesthetic of Decadent transgression that questions and subverts traditional gender and power dynamics, gender identities, and sensual feminine subjectivities
Turning Up the Volume on Translation: Transforming Narratives in the Work of Mercè Rodoreda
Full text linkThis paper considers literary translation as a process that is both transformative and disruptive. Translation engenders movement, not only across languages, but it moves ideas from the centre to the periphery, and from the periphery to the centre. I argue that the translation of literature facilitates the movement and transfer of social narratives between languages and cultures, and in doing so, the very nature of these narratives is altered. Defining social narratives as “the stories we tell ourselves, not just those we tell other people, about the world(s) in which we live” (Baker 19), this paper considers how the properties of such narratives are transformed when translated for new audiences and readerships. Using the vocabulary of sound and volume, I identify and label social narratives on a spectrum of quiet and loud, moving away from previously used binary descriptions, in order to describe the power dynamics at play within world literature. I argue that the interaction between narratives in translation can be discussed in terms of amplification, muting, or silencing, in particular when considering the position and status of source and target languages. To demonstrate this new means with which to describe this process in translation, I take as a case study twentieth-century Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda’s novel La mort i la primavera (1986), and its English translation Death in Spring (2017), identifying how narratives interact and function across cultures, and how they may be made quieter or louder, in order to resonate with, or be ‘heard’ by new audiences
Queering Sight: Visualising the Transversal Other in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box
Full text linkThe gaze has hitherto occupied a contentious position within theoretical discourse. While feminist and postcolonial approaches have succeeded in productively interrogating the unequal power dynamics produced by the gaze, purely naming and uncovering how these visual oppressions function do little to conceptualise possibilities of moving beyond sight’s vilification in identity formations. Unlike other physical senses such as touch and smell that have already been theorised as bases of ethical intersubjective relationality, sight has yet to be reclaimed as part of an affirmative politics to disrupt the exclusionary processes that undergird identity politics. This article is, therefore, concerned with queer interventions to rethink sight as a possible mode of transgression from restrictive binarisms within identity formation. It argues that sight instead possesses the potential to liberate bodies and constrained subjectivities from the coercive frameworks of visual objectification. By queering sight, the article positions itself as a rejection of dualistic paradigms by subversively envisioning identities as transversal processes of liberation and becoming. To this end, I will engage with Josh Malerman’s Bird Box (2014) where mediated acts of looking represent queer(ed) sources of danger and liberation. In its peculiar and particular denial of direct visual access, the novel’s aesthetics allow for productive possibilities of visualising the transversal Other
Ageing and Death: A Focus on How to Transcend Diseases for Transhumanist Movements
Full text linkThe concept of transhumanism is based on a specific understanding of human limitations that should or could be transcended. Among them, the question of overcoming our own corporeality through the delaying of ageing or death is of major importance for a new understanding of human plasticity and fluidity when shaping ourselves and our environment. As transhumanism advocates for human enhancement through technological means, it considers ageing and death as diseases and criticizes their necessity in the human evolutionary process. In light of this transhumanist question, this article discusses ageing and death as diseases for which there must be technological solutions. It underlines that a philosophical approach is necessary to highlight how correlated and interrelated those subjects are and tries to go beyond humanist dichotomies to make clearer how major notions (health, enhancement, etc.) are intertwined with each other and consequently shape our socio-political subjectivities. Given this context, this article discusses the fact that medicine is traditionally structured on a limit that seems to be more and more plastic to pave the way for new debates, such as human enhancement, morphological freedom, and biocultural capital. It then discusses how transhumanism tries to transcend what is considered human structures by examining death as a fatal degeneration that could be overcome through biological amortality and informational immortality
Resisting Transhistorical Violence: Fringe and Art Activism
Full text linkBetween 1587 and 1589, Netherlandish artist Jan van der Straet engraved a series of plates entitled New Inventions of Modern Times. One, Allegory of America, portrays an Indigenous woman in a feathered headdress and skirt eagerly welcoming Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci as he steps onto land. Van der Straet’s work occupies space in a long history of male European artistic depictions of Indigenous women, but the white colonial gaze evident in Allegory has not gone unchallenged. In 2007, Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) responded to transhistorical violence against Indigenous women and girls with a billboard instalment entitled Fringe. Although originally displayed as a direct response to the Pickton murders in Vancouver, Fringe transcends a single event or story. Belmore’s billboard reimagines controlling images that construct Indigenous women as sexually available conquests. She strips the image of the icons that artists have used to represent Indigenous women. By placing the billboard in a crowded metropolitan area, Belmore forces the viewer to confront the still-present reality of Indigeneity alongside the concomitant brutality of settler colonialism. Belmore’s art functions on multiple levels to convey a sense of survivance in the face of systemic attempted genocide. Fringe is a fully realised, modern, and powerful piece of art activism that transforms visual culture. In this paper, I analyse the transhistorical effects of art as a tool of colonisation, as seen in van der Straet’s work. I then theorise Fringe as a vibrant piece of art activism (artivism) that subverts the white male colonial gaze
David Lurie and the ‘Disease of Romanticism’: The Transnational and Transcultural Afterlives of Goethe and Kleist in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Full text linkMy paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mutations of two key figures of German Romanticism: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. Coetzee’s novels are reflections and reproductions of his extensive reading of politics and literature; these texts grant the lives and works of old masters a renewal, a re-introspection, and most importantly, a resurrection into contemporaneity. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace operates as a site of racial and sexual contentions. Through the character of David Lurie, Coetzee initiates a dialogue between the \u27visions\u27 of the former colonizer and the ‘revisions’ of the newly emancipated colonized. While the scholarship on the Romantic element in Disgrace (Beard 2007; Easton 2007; Hawkins 2009; and Cass 2013) is predominantly centred on the afterlife of British Romanticism, more particularly, on the roles Byron and Wordsworth play in shaping plot and action, I attempt to read the novel in the light of Coetzee’s critical prose to understand how he draws upon the German Romantic tradition. If Wordsworth and Byron are evoked to characterize the outer, more conspicuous texture of the novel, then the inner, hidden threads that stitch the form and content together are borrowed from Goethe and Kleist. I argue that Coetzee’s romantic sensibility is as much German as British. These two traditions are brought together in Disgrace to re-enact four major leitmotifs of Romantic literature—desire, transgression, punishment, and finally, salvation—in a transformed political dispensation