Keyvan Allahyari Keyvan Allahyari i(13379228 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 What Is the (Australian) Refugee Novel? Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 305-316)

'The refugee novel is a problematic classificiation, especially when one adds a national label to it. This chapter examines the writing of Behrouz Boochani, Michelle de Kretser, and Felicity Castagna in the context Australia’s treatment of refugees. It argues that refugee fiction can play a vital epistemological and ethical role in the Australian context, while also emphasizing the dangers of commodification that dog the category of “refugee writing.”' (Publication abstract)

1 Coda: What’s (Not) in a Name? Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 195-219)

'This short coda is an apologia disguised as a question. It asks: what’s not in Peter Carey—the name? Descriptors like the national, the global, the celebrity author, all fail to capture the full story: of giving up lucrative careers for writing, of small cruelties along the way, commercially catastrophic novels, the anxieties of dealing with publishers that simply will not take Australian literature seriously—of a whole box of rejection letters in the archive. Somewhere in the recesses of Carey’s fiction lie the story of these sacrifices, compromises, and expectations that slip through the narrative of globalising authorship.' (Publication abstract)

1 Local Publisher, Global Agent Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 133-189)

'This chapter focuses on three late-career Carey novels, namely My Life as a FakeParrot and Olivier in America, and Amnesia, on the thread to complete my analysis of Carey’s ongoing engagement in and around his fiction with the status of the Australian author in the transnational literary marketplace. Carey’s visibility in this period is marked by his shifting position in relation to the globalising publishing industry, the rise of digital publishing, and the mutations of academic and political recognition into convertible cultural capital in the literary field. These changes in practice and modes of recognition are analogous with the aggressive move towards monopoly capitalism by corporate systems in liberal democracies, including Australia.' (Publication abstract)

1 The Archive and the Canon Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 107-132)

'The purchase of the documents relating to True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by the State Library of Victoria amounts to a significant moment in his career. This collection, catalogued as “The Papers and Drafts of Peter Carey,” marks the convergence of canonicity, the literary market, and the materiality of the cultural artefact. This archive adds a new facet to Carey’s image as an Australian author in the public domain, creating a sense of the continuous relevance of Carey’s work to the canon of Australian literature. I demonstrate how the archive is built via the collective recognition of the economic and cultural capital of Carey’s manuscripts and paraphernalia. Through the case study of an agent in constructing the archive, I investigate the stakes invested in Carey’s ongoing dominant position in the Australian literary field into the twenty-first century. This chapter also examines the ways in which agents augment their volume of literary and economic capital through engaging with what I call Carey’s “archival capital.”' (Publication abstract)

1 The New Creative Economy Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 55-106)

'This chapter analyses Carey’s fiction and author-persona in relation to the aesthetic and sociological developments in the increasingly globalising literary marketplace of the 1980s and 1990s. In the previous chapter, I demonstrated that Carey’s entrance into the literary field as the most successful Australian short story writer of his generation was facilitated by developments such as University of Queensland Press’ (UQP) progress as a major publisher of Australian fiction, the establishment of the Literature Board, the ending of the Traditional Markets Agreement, and the rise of the countercultural literary magazine in Australia. In this chapter, Carey’s celebrity in the 1980s and the 1990s will be examined in relation to the politics of literary prizes, the prominence of postcolonial critique, and the changing politics of authorial promotion in the publishing industry.' (Publication abstract)

1 Into the Marketplace Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 31-53)

'This chapter aims to reconstruct the various economic and symbolic rewards of publishing Carey’s first collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History (1974). It offers a lateral examination of two interrelated aspects of Carey’s early fiction. It captures a continuum of Australian and transnational practices of literary distinction and advancement governing the success of the University of Queensland Press (UQP) and The Fat Man. These phenomena include the dominance of postmodern critique, governmental patronage of the Australian short story, and the termination of the Traditional Market Agreement. I explore the structural homologies between Carey’s position-takings in the literary field and the ways in which his characters engage with systems of cultural production and consumption. I then examine the evolution of Carey’s literary capital as his medium of publication shifts from literary magazines to UQP books and then onto prestigious international publishers such as Faber and Faber.' (Publication abstract)

1 The Novelist, Australia, World Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 9-30)

'This chapter is a note on the how and the why of my method in dialogue with existing scholarship on Carey. It shows that conceptualising Carey in the context of global literature helps us to appreciate, not only his larger body of work for its complex representation of concurrent cultural economics, but also the ways that the process of production in the publishing industry coalesces with the mechanics of diffusion and the regimes of reception. Here, I broach my central questions: how and, to what extent, can we think of Carey’s fiction and his writerly persona as cultural objects circulating within the global literary marketplace? How does his fiction refract the market forces that manufacture his books and his celebrity? What is the relationship between Carey’s stories and the literary marketplace, between the making of his books and the reading of them? And what possibilities of resistance against the vagaries of neoliberal publishing remain for Carey as an avowedly postcolonial writer? ' (Publication abstract) 

1 At the Literary Dinner : An Introduction Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist 2023; (p. 1-8)

'This chapter sets the scene of the book by looking at an angry fax by Peter Carey to Robert McCrum, Faber, and Faber’s editor, about a speech that Carey had given to booksellers and publishers “at a literary dinner” in Sydney in 1988. The image of Australian readers consuming books at a literary dinner becomes Carey’s grudging metaphor for Australia’s consumption of books published by British firms. The literary dinner brings together the agents involved in a set of relations which centres around the identity of the Australian author with all its accompanying baggage, against the demands of a literary marketplace that thrived increasingly on authors as commodified literary celebrities in the 1980s.' (Publication abstract)

1 y separately published work icon Peter Carey : The Making of a Global Novelist Keyvan Allahyari , Cham : Palgrave Macmillan , 2023 26408788 2023 multi chapter work criticism biography

'Peter Carey: The Making of a Global Novelist recounts Peter Carey's literary career from his emergence in the Australian literary scene as a contributor to local literary magazines to when he published his fiction exclusively with large conglomerate publishers. As Australia's most decorated author for a period nearing half a century, Carey's career gives unparalleled insights into the global contemporary publishing and the making of global literary prestige from the periphery, and significant cultural currency for Australian literature and culture worldwide. Carey's fiction is not only a product of the global dynamic in literary publishing of the last quarter of the twentieth century, but also it holds something of its productive tension for Australian writing and writers. Allahyari retraces the fraught synthesis of an individual literary proclivity with a growing commercial cultural appetite: the coincidence of Carey's career with the conglomeration of global publishing pushed further towards anti-elitist, popular aesthetics.'  (Publication summary)

1 The Boochani Effect : Public Feelings and the Limits of Refugee Authorship Keyvan Allahyari , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 59 no. 2 2023; (p. 143-156)

'The mediagenic publicity of the multiple prize-winning Kurdish Iranian author Behrouz Boochani has elevated him to an emblematic status for the struggles of refugees, and his 2018 book, No Friend but the Mountains, into a mega-text. These promotional strategies are marked by the mutation of humanitarian awards into convertible cultural capital in the Australian literary field. This article argues that the dissemination of Boochani’s image is qualified with a surplus of affect – in both registers of affectation and of feeling – in the public domain. What I term the “Boochani effect” mobilizes a large number of actors in the cultural sphere to engage with the burgeoning interest in refugee writing, while emphasizing Boochani’s position as simultaneously an “Australian” and a “refugee”. Boochani’s work and author-persona thus generate a “disciplinary trouble”, a problem of taxonomy that both refracts and resists the limits of the mechanisms of identity-making for the refugee writer.' (Publication abstract)

1 Algorithm Mood Keyvan Allahyari , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , June 2022;

— Review of Sadvertising Ennis Cehic , 2022 selected work short story

'In July 2021, the American billionaire Jeff Bezos completed the first private flight to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and back in a spacecraft unapologetically resembling a giant penis. New Shepard, as it was called, carried Amazon’s owner, his brother Mark (Jeff’s spitting image), an 82-year-old ex-pilot, and a young Dutchman whose enthusiasm for the 8-minute space trip cost him $28 million. In the press conference after the landing, a grinning Bezos thanked all the Amazon customers around the world, saying, ‘you guys paid for this’. The audience indulged the good humour of one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Haha! None taken!'  (Introduction)

1 The Politics of Disgust : Form and Feeling in Christos Tsiolkas’s Merciless Gods Keyvan Allahyari , Tyne Daile Sumner , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 35 no. 1 2021; (p. 36-52)

'Merciless Gods (2014) is Christos Tsiolkas’s only collection of short stories and arguably his least discussed work to date. Comprising stories that Tsiolkas published in various literary magazines and anthologies as early as 1995, Merciless Gods is persistent in its fixation on the relationship between queer desire, identity, and disgust. Throughout the collection, characters are frequently exposed to the bodily discharges that most of us tend to dissociate from, cringe at, and conceal from one another: sweat, semen, odor, and excrement. Characters also blurt out vile homophobic and racist bigotry in impulsive overflows of speech that bring about release and disgust at the same time. In this article, we read the spasmic (in all its forms) as a liminal space of joy and repulsion that constitutes what we call Tsiolkas’s politics of disgust. We argue that disgust is crucial to Tsiolkas’s deeply humanist and densely historical project, best exemplified in Merciless Gods in the ways that form—short fiction and the collection—arouses distinct feelings in readers that they cannot escape and that Tsiolkas’s work refuses to gloss over. In this way, Merciless Gods testifies to Tsiolkas’s compulsive return to fundamental questions of justice and distribution of misery and well-being.' (Publication abstract)

1 Identity Is Cruel : Capital, Gimmick and Surveillance in the Australian Postdiasporic Short Story Keyvan Allahyari , Tyne Daile Sumner , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 69 2021;
'If we were to take recent controversies in the Australian literary scene as an indication of its current priorities, we would—at least on one pronounced level—encounter what can be generally called an ethics of inclusivity for diasporic writers. Regardless of the degrees of sophistication of these debates, their participants appeal to the primacy of diasporic identity—its sheer visibility—as a necessary part of the constitution and imaginary of contemporary literature vis-à-vis the nation’s demographic composition. This call for equity of representation is frequently paired with an emphasis on the labour of diasporic writers in surmounting obstacles for publishing narratives about multicultural life, and the structural biases of literary institutions, cultural awards and (white) critics against diasporic writing. The shared assumption here is that there exists an overlap of inequalities between social and literary worlds. What often remains a moot question is the extent to which disseminating diasporic representation is aligned with models of consumption prediction that are predicated on a direct relationship between institutionally fashionable terms such as diversity and inclusion, and maximising business performance schemes. As Sara Ahmed has observed, diversity is associated with conditions of work which are already promoted by organisations. ‘The story of diversity’, she writes, ‘thus becomes a story of diversity’s inclusion into the terms of an institution’ (9).'

 (Introduction)

1 Punishment and Pedagogy : The Casual Future of Teaching Literary Studies Keyvan Allahyari , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 68 2021;

'I could follow Justin Clemens’ pointed question in his ‘Manifesto for an International University’ with a rhetorical ‘or both?’ It seems to me that to pick either debasement or disposability would bypass the combined insult and injury of working as a casual teacher in a state of offense to the University; I mean you—if you are a casual teacher—carry an unwelcome status as simultaneously the University’s disobedient citizen, near-superfluous to its educational structure and its legal liability. The problem of casual teaching remains a postscript to the bulking literature of cri de coeur about the ‘crisis’ of the corporate University (for example see Connell). This crisis has launched hordes of ‘defences’ for literary studies on the grounds of its shifting relevance to labour-capital relations, characterised by the erosion of institutional guarantee, and the perpetuation of precarity. It is hardly a head-scratcher that it remains within the domain of the hypothetical ‘rare tenured critic’ to strive for ‘different answers’ to questions about what constitutes the program, and how the classroom can keep it alive (Kornbluh). As for answers, think of a whole book of lamentations for the loss of the discipline’s cultural repertoire, appeals to its economic contribution to the ‘creative industries’, and counsel on how to repurpose the transmission of literary knowledge—often all at the same time. In one recent example, Rita Felski has called for new ‘justifications for the costs of the humanities’ by focusing on the alliterative sequence of ‘curating, conveying, criticising, composing’ (Felski).' (Introduction)

1 This New Writing Keyvan Allahyari , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , April 2021;

— Review of Josephine Rowe on Beverley Farmer Josephine Rowe , 2020 single work essay

'In A Body of Water (1990), Beverley Farmer chronicles her thoughts on how to reshape her work in favour of a more personal expression. Her early writing now feels foreign to her: ‘Assuming that I want to go on writing the conventional sort of fiction that I have been. Why do I assume that?’ By that stage, she had written three collections of short stories – Snake (1982), Milk (1983), and Home Time (1985) – none ‘conventional’ in any strict sense of the word – and a novella, Alone, which she completed in the late 1960s and was published in 1980.' (Introduction)

1 Nirvana at the Consulting Company Keyvan Allahyari , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020;

— Review of Elephants with Headlights Bem Le Hunte , 2020 single work novel

'There is a case to be made about the relationship between accelerative capitalism and its eager embrace of Eastern mysticism’s notion of unlimited human potential. Both discourses use, for one thing, the lexicon of liberation – sex, good, superego, bad. And there is no way to stop the cosmic forces of either human consciousness or capital because apparently that is where the intelligent evolution of all existence is taking us. The controversial love-guru, Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho), once grunted that criticisms of his wealth, which included the world’s largest collection of Rolls-Royces, reeked of communist inclinations. Speaking at Woodstock, Swami Satchidananda urged American youth to aid the world spiritually now that they were leading it economically. Some of the greatest publicity for these globalised yogis were their celebrity devotees; Maharishi Mahesh, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, had the Beatles; Steve Jobs – whose Apple logo was, by one account, inspired by his reverence for the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba – had reportedly only one book on his iPad when he died, Paramahansa Yogananda’s The Autobiography of A Yogi.' (Introduction)

1 The Trouble of Middle Eastern Literature Keyvan Allahyari , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , November 2019;

Semi-autobiographical: includes the author's account of his life in Australia and his sense of being understood via people's memories of reading accounts of the Middle East.

1 Transnodal Keyvan Allahyari , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 413 2019; (p. 48)

— Review of Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace : 1840s-1940s David Carter , Roger Osborne , 2018 multi chapter work criticism biography
'While working in the London advertising world in the late 1960s, Peter Carey sent his stories to a leading New York literary magazine, Evergreen Review, only to be unimpressed by another rejection. He brooded later: there was ‘something glorious and futile in attempting to make Australian literature when, as everybody in London knew, [it] did not exist’. In Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s, David Carter and Roger Osborne show that the metropolitan triangle of Melbourne/Sydney–London–New York had been a publishing circuit for at least a century before Carey’s transatlantic, or, as it is appositely termed here, ‘transnodal’, misadventure. The book’s prosaic title predicts its consistently empirical approach and macroscopic canvas of the production, circulation, and afterlives of Australian literary commodity in the United States.' (Introduction)
1 On Oxytocin Keyvan Allahyari , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 411 2019; (p. 37)

— Review of Into the Fire Sonia Orchard , 2019 single work novel

'The American writer bell hooks had characterised the 1990s as a period of ‘collusion’ between well-educated white women and the capitalist patriarchy (Where We Stand: Class matters, 2000). The new workplace gave these women greater economic power but curbed their agency in altering the structures of the ruling system. All the while, division of labour at home remained more or less unchanged, with women as the primary contributors. This made them feel, hooks recalls, ‘betrayed both by the conventional sexism … and by the feminism, which insisted work was liberating’ without addressing the dearth of job opportunities for women of less privileged classes.' (Introduction)

1 Behrouz Boochani’s Literary Prize Cements His Status as an Australian Writer Keyvan Allahyari , Paul Rae , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 1 February 2019;

'When the author Richard Flanagan described Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker currently held on Manus Island, as “a great Australian writer”, he turned tired cliché into a pointed question: what makes an “Australian” writer?'  (Introduction)

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