Portfolio of 3 Stories : ‘Everyone’s the Same Inside’, ‘Sergeant Pepper, Sunshine Superman’, ‘If You Can’t See Me I Can’t See You’
- Submitting institution
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University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 177749720
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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-
- Location
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- Brief description of type
- University of Aberdeen
- Open access status
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- Month
- November
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Three published stories submitted as a single item, comprising parts of a short story sequence planned for book-length publication. ‘Everyone’s the Same Inside’ was published in The Best European Fiction (Dalkey Press, New York 2017) and the BBC Radio 4 ‘Scottish Shorts’ series (March 2016). It was also runner-up in the Sean O’Faolain International Short Story Prize (2015). ‘Sergeant Pepper, Sunshine Superman’ was published in the Edinburgh Review’s valedictory final issue (March 2015). ‘If You Can’t See Me I Can’t See You’ appeared in the Australian journal Westerley (November 2018).
Loosely interlinked through character and setting (the period of the 1980s miners’ strike in south Wales), the stories share a preoccupation with post-industrial decline and its concomitant redundancies (understood in a broader sense as a complex of economic, social and psychological after-effects and -affects, the crises of agency, relation and identity brought about by rapid and destructive neo-liberal change). The initial drafting of ‘Sergeant Pepper’ and ‘If You Can’t See Me’ was supported by a Scottish Arts Council New Writer Award (2012-13).
The architecture and trajectory of each story is informed by lacunae and dislocation, expressions of a particular (though in many ways ongoing) moment of history where working class familial, community and inter-generational continuities devolve rapidly and bewilderingly into the ‘edgeland’ liminalities of use and dis-use, directionless agency and alienation, close in spirit to Kieller’s post-Thatcherite visual treatment of London as a ‘place of shipwreck and the vision of Protestant isolation’. Though rooted in fictionalised autobiographical experience rather than theoretical premises or imperatives, the microcosmic ecologies of redundancy common to each story are in some key ways informed by a broadly phenomenological attitude to physical experience, environment and articulation: a materialist understanding of the often uncanny ‘spectralities’ and dissociations generated by neo-liberal occlusions and elisions in the wider culture.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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