Current PhD Students

Joshua D'Arcy

Thesis Title:

Weird Infrastructure: The Weird in the World Literary System

Supervisors:

Dr Claire Westall & Dr Bryan Radley

Description:

My thesis understands literary Weirdness as an aesthetic that registers the systemic and cyclical transformations of capital, particularly neoliberal capitalism. Breaking from the view of the Weird as a generic form deriving linearly from the work of H.P Lovecraft, my research builds on arguments that Weird fiction registers the first signs of an incipient phase of world-economic contraction through the recognition of crisis in times of ostensible expansion and growth (Shapiro 2016). I put forward that infrastructure appears Weird when it literalises world-ecological relations in a way that contradicts neoliberal fantasies of “Capitalist Realism” (Fisher 2009) and I compare “Weird” literary depictions of oil pipelines, railways, sanitation/sewage systems, and digital communications infrastructures across the world-literary system.

Through this I argue that the literary Weird is the affective registration of novel social forms emerging through infrastructural transformations in the capitalist world-ecology. Using the world-systemic framework outlined by the Warwick Research Collective, my comparisons unpack Weird formal homologies in infrastructurally-bound literature from Europe, Iran, Korea, Nigeria, Russia, and the US, arguing for the world-literary scope of the Weird. Crucially, these comparisons are conducted in relation to signals of accumulation crisis produced by the ecological regime that is neoliberal capital. For this reason I mostly focus on material written between the1980s and the present day, including work by artists such as Anna Mill, Ben Okri, Bong Joon-ho, Dmitri Glukhovsky, Nuala Ni Dhomnaill, and Reza Negarestani. By examining how crisis is written into the Weird infrastructure of our world-literary system, I hope to demonstrate how Weird responses to crisis reverberate with anticipation for novel social dynamics and forms.

I was a committee member of the Countervoices CMODS Postgraduate Forum 2019/2020 and an organiser of the #CMODSPAN 2020 Twitter conference. Most recently, I was on the organising committee for the 2021 Process, Practice, Environmental Crisis Symposium. I teach regularly on the 'Approaches to Literature I: Writing Modernity' module.