Birkbeck’s very own Alluvium Journal has just published its May issue (Vol. 5, No. 2), which features articles on games studies, the contemporary historical novel, Roberto Bolaño's fiction, and the relationship between popular literature and "Quality TV." In "What Game Worlds Can Teach Us About Literary Worlds," Alistair Brown (University of Durham) argues that thinking about how game designers construct space, and the way this affects the stories that players can experience within games, might invite us to think about how literary places are conceptualised by an author, and how the configuration of places affects the experiences of characters and the permutations of plot. In "The Contemporary Historical Novel & The Novel of Contemporary History," Xavier Marcó Del Pont (University of Oxford) suggests that historical fiction would benefit from a much wider temporal scope, one that would include the novel of contemporary history and historiographic metafiction as some of its subgenres.
Meanwhile, in "The Semblances of Roberto Bolaño," Neil Vallelly (University of Otago) explores the philosophical concept of semblance, drawing on Hegel, Heidegger and Adorno to unpack the function of this form of appearance which, he argues, can open up new readings of Bolaño's fiction. At the point where Bolaño's narratives could point towards reality (citing real historical events or people) and extend beyond the text itself and into the world, these novels turn back on themselves to reveal a mere appearance of reality, or semblance. Finally, in "Consuming Television's Golden Age with Hannibal Lecter," Rowena Clarke (Boston College) examines how popular and genre literatures inform contemporary "Quality TV" in television's so-called Second Golden Age. Focusing on a close reading of NBC's hit TV series, Hannibal, Clarke argues that the show's presentation of the aestheticization of murder should be understood as a comment on the ethics of television violence and the viewers it shapes, in which pulp sensibilities borrowed from popular fiction have transmogrified into quality TV.
Featured image by RodrixAP under a CC BY 2.0 license.
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