Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 11 (2021)

Liam Gearon

The main section of issue 11 (2021), edited by Liam Gearon, deals with the entangled relationship between literature, security, and intelligence. Like other forms of media, books have been used as part of the ideological and intelligence apparatus; authors have been perceived as a physical or ideological threat by dictatorial regimes and targeted alongside intellectuals, to be undermined or even eliminated. While propaganda itself can be considered a weapon of war, books and bombshells often share the same ideological trajectory, particularly during times of war: the cultural always forms a backdrop to conflict. This volume of Text Matters offers a broad treatment of various alignments between the notions of security and cultural production. The subjects addressed include the figure of the spy and themes related to espionage, e.g. in the works of Ciaran Carson; political, cultural and religious destabilizations in (post)Troubles-era Northern Ireland in the poetry of Paul Muldoon and the fiction of Anna Burns; populist and fictional notions of the migrant as "terrorist" in contemporary film and literature; shifting ideas of security in dystopian, post-apocalyptic narratives with a feminist twist (Mad Max: Fury Road); a psychology of security in a reinterpretation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. The remaining three sections, titled "Bodies, Traumas, Transgressions," "Pop Cultural Encounters," and "Literary Continuities" offer a broad array of subjects, ranging from the fictions of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut to the sculptures of Kiki Smith and Shakesperean plays. The concluding part consists of four reviews (of Agnieszka Łowczanin's A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic: Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe, Nolen Gertz's Nihilism, Don DeLillo's The Silence, and Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630). The issue is dedicated to the memory of the journal's Founder, Dorota Filipczak (1963-2021).