Spring 2024 Links

Nuclear and Environmental

W. J. Hennigan, “The US Has Received a Rare Invitation from China. There Is Only One Right Answer.”

Kathleen Kingsbury and W. J. Hennigan, “At the Brink: A Series about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons in an Unstable World.”

Anton Troianovski, “Putin Says West Risks Nuclear Conflict if It Intervenes More in Ukraine.”

David E. Sanger, “Biden’s Armageddon Moment: When Nuclear Detonation Seemed Possible in Ukraine.”

Catie Edmondson, “Senate Approves Expansion of Fund for Nuclear Waste Exposure Victims.”

Anton Troianovski, “Russia to Hold Drills on Tactical Nuclear Weapons in New Tensions with West.”

Noah Smith, “Americans Are Still Not Worried Enough about the Risk of World War.”

Emily Faux, “Deserted Myths and Nuclear Realities: Revisiting the Symbolism of Nuclear Weapons in Contemporary Popular Culture through Oppenheimer.”

Paul Thompson, “Become Death: On Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.”

Motoko Rich and Kiuko Notoya, “Oppenheimer Opens in Nuclear-Scarred Japan, Eight Months After US Premiere.”

Ariel Kaminer, Oppenheimer, My Uncle, and the Secrets America Still Doesn’t Like to Tell.”

Jimmy So, “Killerheimer: American Betrayal in Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan.”

Anna Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire: Death Drive against Ecocide.”

Bill McKibben, “‘D Is for Despair’ Didn’t Sound so Good: A Conversation between Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert.”

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Oneonta Literary Festival, October 17–20, 2024 and the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture.

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In collaboration with SUNY Oneonta’s Department of English, the Community Arts Network of Oneonta (CANO), the Huntington Library, and Oneonta High School, my colleague Tessa Yang and I are co-organizing the Oneonta Literary Festival, which will take place October 17–20, 2024 at various places in and around Oneonta.

For our part, Hartwick College is bringing in Anna Kornbluh to deliver the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture, “Historical Fictions, Heist Flicks, and other Climate Genres for a Burning World,” as part of the festival, along with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ross Gay, and Willy Palomo. For more information, please visit the Oneonta Literary festival website at www.hartwick.edu/literaryfestival.

At Hartwick College, the festival is supported by the Arts and Humanities Division, the Babcock Chair in English, the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the Visiting Writers Series.

“2015.10,” “2015.23,” and “2016.10” Reprinted in What We Did during the Apocalypse: The Archive of “The Babel Tower Notice Board”

What We Did During the Apocalypse--The Babel Tower Notice Board_Page_001The Babel Tower Notice Board, a pandemic project that existed between August 2020 and December 2021 edited by Richard Capener, was just collected in What We Did during the Apocalypse: The Archive of “The Babel Tower Notice Board” (Hem Press, 2024). I was thrilled then and continue to be thrilled that three sonnets of mine, “2015.10,” “2015.23,” and “2016.10,” are part of that project. Thanks again to Capener for his amazing work on The Babel Tower Notice Board, for his monthly Babel Parish Newsletter–a welcome dispatch during those difficult months–and for his continued great work with Hem Press.

(And “2015.10,” “2015.23,” and “2016.10” will all be collected in my third book of poems, 2013–2017: Sonnets, forthcoming in July from LJMcD Communications.)

Robert T. Tally Jr. to Deliver the 2023–24 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College: “Mapping and Monsters: Critical Theory in the Teratocene”

Robert T. Tally Jr. will deliver the 2023–24 Babcock Lecture at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, 2024 in the Eaton Lounge of Bresee Hall at Hartwick College.


“Mapping and Monsters: Critical Theory in the Teratocene” Dystopian visions in our time are complemented by, and subsumed within, a broader sense of the monstrous world system, which increasingly seems to involve the presence of actual monsters. Indeed, ours is a veritable teratocene or “age of monsters.” As the processes of globalization become more starkly experienced, monsters are increasingly rendered invisible or unknowable, as we find ourselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond our control. In the 2023–24 Babcock Lecture, starting with an oft-quoted, if misquoted, observation by Antonio Gramsci—i.e., “[t]he old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” which has circulated in recent years as almost a truism regarding our own historical moment—Robert Tally will discuss the ways in which this misquote (e.g., the more literal translation: “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”) stands as a motto for our era nonetheless. Monsters and monstrosity have developed into critical embodiments of unnamed terrors in postmodernity, symbolizing aspects of globalization, thus making them exemplary figures of late capitalist dread. Drawing upon recent critical theory, Tally examines the “dialectic of fear” in connection with ideologies of the undead, among other monstrosities of our time.


tally-robert-t-jr-author-photoRobert T. Tally Jr. is professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse (Bloomsbury, 2024), Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology (McFarland, 2024), The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies (Anthem, 2023), For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2022), and Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2019). He has also edited more than a dozen books and special issues, including Spatial Literary Studies (Routledge, 2020), Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (Routledge, 2018), and The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (Routledge, 2017).

The 2023–24 Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College

This year, Hartwick College and the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing will present four readings in the 2023–24 Visiting Writers Series. Readings take place at 7:00 in the Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.


Novelist and essayist Shena McAuliffe will read on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 from her new book of short stories, We Are a Teeming Wilderness: Stories (Press 53, 2023).

Poet and emeritus Hartwick professor Robert Bensen will read from his new book, What Lightning Spoke: New and Selected Poems (Bright Hill, 2023), on Wednesday, November 8, 20223.

Yumei Kitasei will read from her new novel, The Deep Sky (Flatiron Books, 2023), on Monday, March 4, 2024.

And poet essayist Joshua Zelesnick will read from his forthcoming poetry collection, Insert Coin (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025), on Thursday, April 11, 2024.

For more information, visit the Visiting Writers Series webpage.

Summer and Fall 2023 Links

The links have really gotten away from me. This summer, I was prioritizing finishing up a chapter for Too Big to Read, and this fall the semester just hammered me; I basically haven’t had a single free moment. So, better late than never, huh? Over six months of links. Enjoy.


Nuclear and Environmental

Apocalyptica, a new journal.

Jeff VanderMeer, “Florida’s Environmental Failures Are a Warning for the Rest of the US.”

Lydia Millet, “Biden’s Green Energy Money Is Sugar on a Poison Pill.”

Tina Cordova, “What Oppenheimer Doesn’t Tell You about the Trinity Test.”

Brad Plumer and Elena Shao, “Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast.”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Heat Is Not a Metaphor.”

David Gelles, “Climate Disasters Daily? Welcome to the ‘New Normal.’”

Tom Engelhardt, “Humanity Has Created Too Many Ways of Destroying Itself.”

Kim Tingley, “‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Us?”

Azby Brown, “Just Like That, Tons of Radioactive Waste Is Heading for the Ocean.”

Raymond Zhong, “Something Was Messing With Earth’s Axis. The Answer Has to Do With Us.”

Damian Carrington, “Canadian Lake Chosen to Represent Start of Anthropocene.”

Ralph Vartabedian, “A Poisonous Cold War Legacy That Defies a Solution.”

The Washington Post, “Where Dangerous Heat Is Surging.”

Michael Levenson, “Heat Wave and Blackout Would Send Half of Phoenix to ER, Study Says.”

Jessica Hurley, “The Irradiated Body as Postcolonial Lost Edge.”

Hoyt Long and Aarthi Vadde, “We Want Our Catastrophe TV.”

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MLA 2024: Twenty-First-Century Forms

For this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, to be held January 4–7, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I organized and will be moderating a roundtable on Twenty-First-Century Forms, featuring the following speakers: Andrew Ferguson, Aislinn McDougall, Élika Ortega, Kimberly Southwick-Thompson, Kaushik Tekur, Anna Torres Cacoullos, and Zach Wagner. I have included the information about the panel and, below that, full abstracts from each speaker.

119. Twenty-First-Century Forms

Thursday, January 4, 2024, 5:15–6:30 p.m. (EST)

If one might argue that the novel and lyric poem have become residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in contemporaneity? Panelists explore emergent literary forms of the twenty-first century and their relationship with, instantiation in, or remediation by other (digital) media: Internet writing, social media, print-digital books, film, television, and other hybrid and multimodal narrative and poetic forms.

Speakers
Andrew Ferguson (U of Virginia)
Aislinn McDougall (U of Regina)
Élika Ortega (U of Colorado, Boulder)
Kimberly Southwick-Thompson (Jacksonville State U)
Kaushik Tekur (Binghamton U, State U of New York)
Anna Torres Cacoullos (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Zach Wagner (Binghamton U, State U of New York)

Presiding
Bradley J. Fest (Hartwick C)

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