MLA 2023: Twenty-First-Century Forms

For this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, to be held January 5–8, 2023 in San Francisco, California, I organized and will be speaking on a roundtable on Twenty-First-Century Forms, along with Daniel Burns, Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Kathryn Harlan-Gran, Kevin Pyon, and Elizabeth Sotelo. I have included the information about the panel and, below that, full abstracts from each speaker.

197. Twenty-First-Century Forms

Friday, January 6, 2023, 8:30–9:45 a.m. (PST)

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: film, documentary, social media, publishing platforms, transmedia, autotheory, and other hybrid narrative and poetic forms.

Speakers
Dan Burns (Elon University)
Bradley J. Fest (Hartwick College)
Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth (The University of Texas at Austin)
Kathryn Harlan-Gran (Cornell University)
Kevin Pyon (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg)
Elizabeth Sotelo (University of Oregon)

Presiding
Bradley Fest (Hartwick College)

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Fall Semester 2022: Syllabi

Hartwick Fall 01This coming fall semester looks like it will be as close to “normal” as it’s been in some time. I’m teaching some familiar creative writing classes that I usually teach in the fall (syllabi below), and filling in for the first half of the semester in our ENGL 101 Writing Tutorial class (syllabus not included). I will again also be teaching our methods course for senior theses in creative writing (ENGL 489).

ENGL 213 Introduction to Creative Writing

ENGL 312 Intermediate Poetry Workshop

The 2022–23 Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College

This year, Hartwick College and the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing will present four readings in the 2022–23 Visiting Writers Series. Readings take place at 7:00 or 7:30 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.

All campus visitors, including attendees at campus-based public events, must have up to date vaccinations for COVID-19. The College reserves the right to require masks on an event-by-event basis.


Poet Raena Shirali will read on Thursday, October 27, 2022 at 7:30 p.m., including from her new book summonings (Black Lawrence, forthcoming 2022).

Fiction writer Tessa Yang will read from her brand new collection, The Runaway Restaurant (7.13, forthcoming October 2022) on Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at 7:00 p.m.

Fiction writer, poet, and game designer Julian K. Jarboe will read from their work on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 at 7:00 p.m.

And poet and nonfiction writer Sten Carlson will read from his work on Friday, April 28, 2023 at 7:00 p.m.

For more information, visit the Visiting Writers Series webpage.

Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 29: July 16–August 15, 2022

This is the last volume in my “Links in the Time of Coronavirus” series. This is for a few reasons. First and foremost, a new academic year is about to start, and I know I’m going to be busy (especially this coming semester), will again fall behind with posting regularly, and would like to return to putting up just four(ish) link posts per year (one each season: e.g., “Fall 2022 Links”). This will also allow me to be more selective and less encyclopedic in my links and to worry less about capturing the full “fabric” of events as I perceive them (from my obviously limited and privileged subject position). Second, as the CDC has just (quite controversially) considerably reduced COVID-19 guidelines—with the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Greta Massetti saying: “‘This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where COVID-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,'” adding later that: ‘”We know that COVID 19 is here to stay,'”—it seems as good a point as ever, considering these links began on the occasion of an official body (the World Health Organization) declaring a global pandemic, to stop this series.

For no matter how much we may disagree with the CDC’s decision, Massetti’s latter point seems pretty clearly the case at this point, that COVID-19 is here to stay, and it is this point in particular that has made me to decide to cease grouping my links as part of the “time of coronavirus” series. It appears that there will never now not be a time of coronavirus; from here on out any links I post will always be “in the time of coronavirus.” (When I imagine keeping this series going until we might say it is “not” the time of coronavirus—such a prospect is dauntingly disheartening.) Let me be clear, however: my decision to discontinue this series has nothing to do with thinking that the pandemic is “over,” only that it appears to have made a shift to something that—woefully, unfortunately, perhaps criminally—is just part of the fabric of being human in the twenty-first century; it has become a fact of our lives no matter how much we wish it had all gone differently, wish that we lived in a world/country with a functioning healthcare system and a greater agreement about scientific facts, with a greater capacity to care for each other, to wear masks, to get vaccinated, etc. But we didn’t, we don’t. The current point the pandemic has reached, this point of ubiquity, of defeatism, of “normalization,” of the fact that COVID-19 rarely dominates headlines in this time of search warrants and climate bills, means that it is now time, at least for my practice of putting up links, to move them to another position, another standpoint. See you in “Fall 2022 Links.”


Nuclear and Environmental

Emily Cochrane, “Senate Passes Climate, Health and Tax Bill, with All Republicans Opposed.”

Jack Ewing and Ivan Penn, “Climate Bill ‘Transformative’ for Auto and Energy Industries.”

Kate Aronoff, “Congress Is about to Pass a Historic Climate Bill. So Why Are Oil Companies Pleased?”

Paul Krugman, “Did Democrats Just Save Civilization?”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 28: June 16–July 15, 2022

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Nuclear and Environmental

Eric Schlosser, “What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?”

Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Strips Federal Government of Crucial Tool to Control Pollution.”

Zach St. George, “Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?”

Neelan Bohra, “Arizona Wildfire Destroys Observatory Buildings.”

Christopher Flavelle and Julie Tate, “How Joe Manchin Aided Coal, and Earned Millions.”


Politics

Max Fisher, “Is the World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way?”

Carl Hulse, “Mitch McConnell’s Court Delivers.”

Charlie Savage, “Decades Ago, Alito Laid Out Methodical Strategy to Eventually Overrule Roe.”

Ezra Klein, “Dobbs Is Not the Only Reason to Question the Legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”

Katherine Stewart, “Christian Nationalists Are Excited about What Comes Next.”

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Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 27: May 16–June 15, 2022

Nuclear and Environmental

Mitt Romney, “We Must Prepare for Putin’s Worst Weapons.”

United Nations Environment Programme, “In South Asia, Record Heat Threatens Future of Farming.”

Margaret Renkl, “One Way to Do More for the Environment: Do Less With Your Yard.”

Christopher Flavelle, “As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces an ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb.’”

Jonathon Catlin, “Why We Love Disaster Films.”


Coronavirus

Noah Weiland, “White House Outlines Coronavirus Vaccine Plan for Children under Five.”

Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland, “FDA Panel Recommends Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines for Youngest Children.”


Ukraine

Anton Troianovski, “‘They Basically Got Everything Wrong’: A Russian Diplomat Speaks Out on the War.”

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Hartwick College’s Faculty Lecture Series, Fall 2022

This fall, the Faculty Development Committee and the Office of Academic Affairs at Hartwick College will present three speakers in the annual Faculty Lecture Series.

All talks take place at during the common hour: 12:20–1:20 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York.

Admission to the readings is free and the events are open to the public. Attendees and all campus visitors must be vaccinated for COVID-19 and will be required to provide either their vaccination card or the New York State Excelsior Pass. Any visitor requiring an exception to this requirement must complete this form and receive prior approval from the College.


Parker Troischt, “How Big Is Big? Using the Most Powerful Explosions in the Universe to
Improve Distance Determinations in Extragalactic Astronomy,” Friday, September 9, 2022.

Cheryl L. Johnson, “Third Culture and Identity: How Much Do I Need until I Am ‘Enough’?,” Friday, October 14, 2022.

Meghan Sheehy, “Investigating the Research-to-Practice Gap in Music Education: Results and Roadblocks,” Friday, November 11, 2022.

For more information, visit the Faculty Lecture Series webpage.

2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College

I am thrilled and honored to announced that for the next three years (2022–25), I will be the Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College. This position will support continued work on my current scholarly book project, Too Big to Read: The Megatext in the Twenty-First Century, the publication of my just completed poetry manuscript, Postrock, and my next two books of poetry, 2018–202X: Sonnets and Synthwave.

For a glimpse into this work in progress, see my recent essay, “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” and some select poem(s) from Postrock and from 2018–202X: Sonnets.

I also get to host an annual Babcock Lecture for the duration of the appointment [stay tuned].