Lars Stannard

This piece is a selection of text from a work of autofiction I submitted for my Final Major Project. In this piece, I explore how suburbia fosters toxic masculinity, apathy, racism, sexism, and placelessness and how that creates disillusioned — yet privileged — young men. I then explore the violence and societal harm that follows, doing so through the lens of a cliched teen drama focused around myself and a fictional group of friends known as The Good Squad. 

Throughout the piece, I use each character to relay these harmful themes, and how their hatred affects other characters. I also touch on how this all relates to larger late-stage Neoliberal Capitalism, and how the suburbanisation and corporatisation of American cities have done a lot of harm to the people living in and outside them. I take a similar tone as to how my friends or I used to talk and tell stories as teenagers. 

The events written throughout the piece are largely based on true events, although altered to better fit the narrative and my character’s own internal analyses. The only people who are “real” throughout the piece are my parents, my younger sister, and myself. Much of the analysis in this piece comes from theorists and authors such as Jane Jacobs, Laura Bates, R.W. Connell, and the Strong Towns organization, and I explore the intersections between late-stage neoliberal capitalism, suburban design, incel and alt-right internet cultures, and toxic masculinity. 

Content warning: several characters use racial and other derogatory slurs throughout this piece. There is very strong and foul language used frequently throughout the text, and there are scenes of physical violence, mentions of sexual violence, and scenes of harassment. Those sensitive to this kind of language are discouraged from reading this piece.

My submission for the “Archaeologies” workshop during the Writing Programme, I go on to talk about Paul Wellstone — a senator from my home state of Minnesota, who died while he was in office in a plane crash. Being the “Bernie Sanders before Bernie Sanders”, I talk about the effect Wellstone had on the resurgence of the American left, why that’s important for current American politics, and why steering American politics to the left is for the better.

In a short piece written for the RCA Scrawl Society’s first publication, I write an autofictional account of my first car, car culture in the United States, and the only time I’ve ever been in a crash.

Two shorter pieces written as part of a larger collection of experimental prose called “The Bunker”. These pieces follow unnamed soldiers, workers, and people living under a Fascist totalitarian government. The works are a response to the Futurist art movement of the 1930s, the Futurist Manifesto, and their connections to what eventually became European Fascism. “The Bunker” serves to highlight the inherent contradictions of right-wing ideology, and uses horror to create political commentary.