AustLit

'This issue of Philament, our twenty-second, embraces a range of poets, as well as writers, essayists, and reviewers. Adam Hulbert’s study of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock draws attention to the many sonic figurations in Lindsay’s novel, offering a fresh reading of the precarious fates of the protagonists in this “preeminent antipodean weird tale.” Blythe Worthy’s study of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers offers a timely problematisation of contemporary identity politics, illuminating new ways in which the novel “exposes feminism’s distinctive markings of precarity.” And Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough’s essay on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia allows us to see the film’s prologue as an example of avant-garde video art. Critics will have already perceived the way in which Melancholia allegorises Earth’s cosmic precarity, revealing this planet’s vulnerability in a universe filled with other celestial bodies, all of them potential collision threats. However, Wansbrough’s essay also shows us how von Trier’s film makes genre and aesthetic categories equally precarious—elements ever threatening to collide. The issue’s short stories—Angelina Koseva’s “The Red Room” and Sian Pain’s “Wildcat”—offer intensive glimpses at precarious milieux in the contemporary cityscape, while varied works of poetry, by Philip Porter, Mona Zahra Attamimi, and Dimitra Harvey, chart their slightly more abstract courses toward this issue’s theme. As always, it is hoped that this issue encourages more scholarship on its theme, and prompts postgraduates in particular to submit to Philament’s future issues.' (From : Facing Precarity)