AV 147.1 — NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

Acta Victoriana’s fall 2022 supplement is now published online. Keep an eye out for updates on the distribution of print copies!

Recent Blog Posts

Review: This is the House that Luke Built by Violet Browne

This Is the House That Luke Built begins with Rose stepping through a wall of the house that her husband Luke was working on. He has died at sea, but through the house, Rose can temporarily see him again. Violet Browne draws on her own experience with loss and builds it into the foundations of Rose’s story as it unfolds. Despite the title and opening scene, much of the book is not about the titular house or Rose’s visits with Luke; rather, we stay close to Rose as she navigates the impact of the loss on herself and her three children, both in the immediate aftermath and over the years that follow.

Universal (Stories About) Medicine: the Banal and Modern in ‘Alī al-Tanūkhī’s Medical Anecdotes

Any definition of modernity is, by virtue of its subject, vertigo-inducing. A phenomenon that necessarily remakes the world in its image, modernity spawns a reality where everything that follows its advent is indicative of its presence. What makes defining modernity hard is that definitions are, naturally, compartmentalizations, and thus things to which modernity cannot lend itself: there’s modernity in your clothes, modernity in your food (I’m not just talking about microplastics), and there’s modernity on your bookshelf. Modernity is everywhere, and trying to catalog something that’s everywhere is an arduous, if not unthinkable, task.

On “Modesty” and “Mediocrity”

The model minority myth, or, “Asian stereotypes”—they are usually something along the lines of strict parents and “good at x,” where x may be any possible subject you can think of. As someone with an Asian background, I can attest that we sure do get a good laugh out of them—the former stereotype because it is pretty accurate, the latter because it is most certainly not, at least according to the aforementioned parents,

…and consequently, ourselves.

Excitable Knowledge: Dromology and Illiteracy

Two months ago, I was put off by vaguely humanoid Stable Diffusion generated shapes that people were passing off as their own work, and unnerved by an exceptionally warm day in October. Today, I was disgusted by an ad promoting paid services for bot-written essays, and horrified by what felt like a summer day at the onset of winter. The dismal reality at hand is that things aren’t just moving fast anymore; the speed at which they speed up is itself speeding up. We lurch further, with every passing minute, into an unending and banal milieu of crises, and all we can do is watch as the death spiral etches towards a velocity we can no longer keep pace with. The long awaited man-made horrors are advancing beyond our comprehension as everything else stumbles and falls onto the asphalt.

The “Sad Girl” Reduction

In a video for Crack Magazine, Japanese-American singer-songwriter Mitski makes the following statement: “You know, the sad girl thing was reductive and tired like five, ten years ago and it still is today,” in response to a fan tweeting that the day on which Mitski releases new music is a “big day for sad bitches.” Mitski’s statement is one we’ve been hearing a lot lately, in response to the onslaught of internet “sad girls,” who seem to have made it their mission to reduce popular media made by or about (young) women to a canvas that perfectly depicts their sadness. As a consumer and enjoyer of art that often gets the “for sad girls” label slapped on it, hearing Mitski’s response, I couldn’t help but agree with her and empathize with her frustration at having her art reduced to a pseudo-identity, but I also found myself feeling a sense of sympathy and understanding for the self-proclaimed “sad girls.”

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It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified

– Friedrich Nietzsche,

Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik

Recent Supplements

145.2

There is a garden in my belly / with a snowy glass-bottle ground

146.1

I thought I saw / two horses riding each other / under a double moon

146.2

I carry the morning on my back / like a mother carries three children at once

canada’s oldest literary journal

Acta Victoriana

Acta Victoriana is the literary journal of Victoria College and the longest running university student publication in Canada. Since its founding in 1878, it has maintained a legacy of artistic excellence and boasts alumni such as Margaret Atwood, George Elliot Clarke, and E. J. Pratt.

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