Dr Hannah Spruce

Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI), released November 2024, is a nine-track album showcasing Glasgow’s radical history through music from The Tenementals, a band of academics, musicians, and artists.

The chapter examines the memoir Mean (2017) by Chicana author Myriam Gurba and the novel The Break (2016) by Métis writer Katherena Vermette. Through textual analysis, the chapter shows how these two writers resist dominant ideas concerning “psychopathy” that perpetuate gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes. The chapter argues that these authors unsettle psychopathy as something situated in the individual to depict the United States and Canada as psychopathic structures that create the conditions for certain forms of violence to flourish. Vermette and Gurba’s work contributes to the body of Indigenous and Chicana writing that rejects, rewrites, and resists misleading images of violence.

Around the millennium, disability scholars began to comment on the circulation of a stigmatising characterisation of people on the autistic spectrum in the news media. These reports, emerging after acts of mass violence, drew unsubstantiated connections between individuals seen or diagnosed as autistic and an aura of dangerousness. I first explore how ideas of volatility have been associated with autistic identity largely through narratives around shootings. I then turn to literature to analyse how Elizabeth Moon’s 2003 novel The Speed of Dark explores the impact of this troubling pairing and resists the association of autistic identity and violence.

Book review

The chapter examines the memoir Mean (2017) by Chicana author Myriam Gurba and the novel The Break (2016) by Métis writer Katherena Vermette. Through textual analysis, the chapter shows how these two writers resist dominant ideas concerning “psychopathy” that perpetuate gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes. The chapter argues that these authors unsettle psychopathy as something situated in the individual to depict the United States and Canada as psychopathic structures that create the conditions for certain forms of violence to flourish. Vermette and Gurba’s work contributes to the body of Indigenous and Chicana writing that rejects, rewrites, and resists misleading images of violence.

This paper examines the presence and impact of the Kristevan chora in the kite poetry of Seamus Heaney, demonstrating how the presence of the chora in his final kite poem “A Kite for Aibhín” is used to alter the discursive representation of fatherhood that was handed down to Heaney through symbolic language. The views of Heaney and Kristeva on the revolutionary potential of poetry is analysed alongside Heaney’s poetry to glean an understanding of how poetry has a profound impact on identity and representation. This paper proves that for Heaney poetry afforded weighty individual change, acting as a technological medium through which he could alter language.