This article examines how algorithmic and machine-learning-based creative practices can offer new modes for narrating, and mourning, species extinction in the Anthropocene. To do so, I conduct a creative-practice-led analysis of the Artificial Extinction Archives (AEA): a new media artwork wherein a TensorFlow audio model has been trained to recognize the audio vocalizations of fifteen extinct or likely extinct bird species. I argue that computational media can make perceptible the haunting presence of lost species by staging encounters with fragmented translations of these vocalizations. The AEA produces partial, poetic textual apparitions when contemporary environmental sounds partially resemble archived recordings. This intentional incompleteness highlights the unnarratability of extinction, which is a vast, multispecies, multi-scalar process, and aligns the work with post-classical narratology, where narrative becomes fragmented and cognitively co-created by readers. Drawing on extinction studies, material ecocriticism, and computational narratology, I argue that fragmented, combinatory, algorithmic narrative and poetry forms can reflect the discontinuities and absences that structure ecological loss. I further argue that the act of making such an artwork constitutes a form of ecological mourning in itself.
This article discusses a recent genre of BrexLit-literary works that have anticipated or directly responded to the Brexit referendum in 2016-and its contribution to the cartography of political writing in Europe. The events preceding and following the Brexit vote witnessed a flourishing cultural and literary activity. What is now discussed under the category of 'BrexLit' encompasses a growing thematic and generic richness-state-of-the-nation novels, crime and thrillers, dystopian narratives, poetry, drama and essays. Focusing on a selection of Brexit poetry that have so far not received much critical attention, and novels and non-fiction that have tended to identify with the Remain position, explore how these texts capture the zeitgeist of Brexit. I look at the ways in which they contest the politics of borders and expose the desire to take back control of national sovereignty as being deeply rooted in Britain's unresolved post-imperial fantasies. I analyse the anxieties surrounding post-2004 EU migration and the tensions between the discourses of Euroscepticism and Europhilia, placing these works in the context of wider and unresolved debates about the nation's imperial legacy. I conclude by offering my own contribution to the genre with a poem entitled 'Communist Balcony' that unsettles the politics of borders through an oppositional discourse centring the 'Eastern European' migrant experience.
The manuscript Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Guelf. 367 Helmstedt (hereafter cited as HAB) forms a 'Flacian compilation' in which the Lutheran theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520-1575) assembled texts to demonstrate the continuity of the Christian tradition throughout a period dominated by the so-called papal Antichrist. This manuscript contains two sermons delivered against the mendicant orders by the Parisian secular theologian William of Saint-Amour (c. 1270-1272) which Flacius found in a now lost codex from St. Andrew’s Library in Braunschweig and printed in his Antilogia papae (1555). Preceding these sermons in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript are a series of brief theological works that Flacius detached, along with the sermons that provide further documentary evidence of the conflict between the seculars and the mendicants at the University of Paris in the mid-1250s. Based on internal evidence, three of these pieces can be ascribed to William of Saint-Amour; a fourth piece may have been written by William and later used by his protégé Nicholas of Lisieux in the latter’s polemical works against the mendicant orders. This paper examines Flacius’ knowledge of and interest in William and analyzes the codex Wolfenbüttel, HAB, Guelf. 367 Helmstedt; it contains an edition of the material found in the folia 77ra–77ar, which Flacius did not publish to show how he preserved hitherto unknown Williamite material.
This article reads Kamila Shamsie's novel A God in Every Stone (2014) as postcolonial historical fiction that seeks to question and complicate colonial archives of conflict - specifically, the British archives documenting the experiences of Indian sepoys in the First World War and inter-war colonial conflict in the Punjab. Taking my cue from the work of scholars such as Karin Barber, Santanu Das and others, I show the value of reading the novel with attention to the way it juxtaposes fictional ephemera on the one hand (letters, photographs, souvenirs) and fictionalised archaeological objects on the other (Gandhara statuary in the Peshawar Museum and stone edicts linked to King Asoka). By incorporating both kinds of material traces of conflict in her novel, I argue, Shamsie questions distinctions between important and unimportant histories and experiences, and highlights the significance of establishing emotional connection with the past(s) we narrate.
Due to advancements in technology, capital-intensive videogames now often include rich semiotic detail in their simulated spaces. In The Last of Us, specifically, much of the playable space is stylised as dilapidated capitalist cities. In this article, I argue that the semiotic constitution of these spaces creates opportunities to reflect critically on contemporary life. It also reveals the ideological complexity of the videogame, challenging assumptions that videogames have singular, authorised meanings, and that mainstream studios produce games that uphold dominant values. By focalising the politics of abundance and the economics of capitalism, I demonstrate that the semiotic landscapes of The Last of Us unravel a parallel set of ideological assertions to those expressed in the dialogic mode - simply, that while dialogue exhorts us to count our blessings in late capitalist society, the semiotic construction of space raises the spectre of the exploited, underpaid worker for whom 'apocalypse' may not be such a terrible thing. My reading draws the actual conflicts between workers and capitalist in the videogame industry into the interpretation of the game itself, and raises the question as to why there is, as yet, no interdisciplinary work at the intersection of linguistic landscapes, ideology critique, and game studies. It aims to break ground for such projects in the future, and to show the transformative value of examining videogames from the perspective of their semiotic landscapes.
