The Grey Zone

The ‘grey zone’ is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. In ‘The Grey Zone’, the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into ‘us’ and ‘them’, two clearly distinct and identifiable groups, but points out that such binary thinking is inadequate in the face of the..

The Grey Zone

The ‘grey zone’ is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. In ‘The Grey Zone’, the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into ‘us’ and ‘them’, two clearly distinct and identifiable groups, but points out that such binary thinking is inadequate in the face of the..

Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011) : Psychic Cli-Fi

This essay gives an overview of the central themes and formal features of Jeff Nichols’s cli-fi film Take Shelter (2011). It also provides insight into the film’s reception and contribution to public debate, as well as offering some teaching ideas

McSweeney's and the challenges of the marketplace for independent publishing

In their article "McSweeney's and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing" Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney's, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers's editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a cultural and economic position that is untainted by the compromises that publishing requires. Still, this disavowed complicity with the market in fact sustains Eggers's editorial practice in McSweeney's, which, in marked contrast to his explicit statements, thrives on a dynamic of commodification

Phantasms of War and Empire in Pat Barker's The Ghost Road

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia which takes place in Pat Barker’sThe Ghost Road (1995), the final instalment of the much lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) which continues to characterize political life in the West. For all its strengths in highlighting the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship which defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reconsideration of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial transgressions which The Ghost Road seems to hold out is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War