Reading at CANO’s Writers Salon

November 10, 2024November 15, 2024 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

I recently published a book, 2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024), the first in an ongoing sonnet sequence. I have written the next book in the sequence, 2018–2024: Sonnets, and I’ve started the third, 2024–20XX: Sonnets, and I will be reading poems from these two most recent projects at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 21, 2024 at the Community Arts Network of Oneonta (CANO)’s Writers Salon at the Wilber Mansion on 11 Ford Ave. I promise a poem about the election (writing it right now).

MLA 2025 Panel: Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block

September 2, 2024 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

At this year’s Modern Language Association Convention in New Orleans, LA (January 9-12, 2025), I will be speaking on a panel discussing Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block. I have included the information about the panel and a tentative abstract for the paper I will be presenting below.

65. Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block

Thursday, January 9, 2025, 1:45-3:00 pm, Windsor (Hilton Riverside New Orleans)

Presiding: Benjamin Bergholtz (Louisiana Tech U) and Aaron Colton (Emory U)

Presentations:
1. “‘No!—But I Must’: The Blocked Writer in Maximalist Fiction,” Benjamin Bergholtz (Louisiana Tech U)
2. “The Craft of Writer’s Block: Autofiction, Process, and Pedagogy,” Aaron Colton (Emory U)
3. “Megatextual Kinaesthetics: The Wanderer above the Sea of Elden Ring,” Bradley Fest (Hartwick C)
4. “Wallace’s Maximalism: Other-Flood and Self-Blockage,” Yonina Hoffman (US Merchant Marine Acad.)

Elden Ring, v. 1.09.1 (Tokyo: Bandai Namco, 2022), PlayStation 4, screenshot by author.

“Megatextual Kinaesthetics: The Wanderer above the Sea of Elden Ring“

In the twenty-first century, the maximalist impulse evident in the big, ambitious novel of the twentieth century has expanded toward the creation of massively unreadable works across media, what Fest has elsewhere called megatexts. From experimental literary projects, to popular forms, to transmedia corporate intellectual property, megatexts abound in the twenty-first century and their presence in both avant-garde and corporate cultural production signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the neoliberal era. Perhaps the most paradigmatic instance of this emerging form is the massive, open-world video game requiring hundreds of hours of playtime to traverse. In the video-game megatext, we see a form striving to create worlds, to build spaces large enough to feel comparable to our own.

In his talk, Fest will focus on FromSoftware’s blockbuster 2022 game Elden Ring as not only a paradigmatic video-game megatext but also the kind of sensorial-conceptual or theoretical text that Patrick Jagoda has recently suggested experimental games can be. Fest will argue that Elden Ring’s open world is an affective, bodily, material sensorium that presents to its players something like what big data feels like, allowing players to experience a haptics of hyperarchivalism, a spatiality of the database. In this way, rather than some monumentally time-sucking waste, Elden Ring might itself constitute a moment of respite, contemplation, and critical engagement with respect to the network society, a moment where the digital realities of contemporaneity, in all their hypermediated and interconnected totality might be critically felt, even if that feeling only occurs as the sensation of a concept.

For previous essays of mine on megatexts and unreadable texts, see:

“Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper.’”

“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”

“Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents.”

“Writing Briefly about Really Big Things.”

“The Megatext and Neoliberalism.”

“The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar.”

2013–2017: Sonnets

July 15, 2024July 21, 2024 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Now available! 2013–2017: Sonnets, my third book of poetry and the first volume of my American Sonnet sequence, has been published by LJMcD Communications. It can be ordered through Amazon.

2013–2017: Sonnets is the first volume in Bradley J. Fest’s ongoing sequence of American sonnets, a project concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Continuing the program of poetic assemblage explored in his first two books, these poems were composed consecutively as emergent temporal snapshots documenting certain experiences of what it was like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017. Over the past decade, this ongoing experimental sonnet sequence has become: a complex encounter with time and its twenty-first-century rhythms; a document of artistic maturation; a personal archive of occasions, moments, days; a continually refreshed confrontation with the global computational hyperarchive; a discography of popular music; an extended reflection on contemporary literature, art, and culture; an increasingly multiplex meditation on the sonnet; an historical record of the troubling national situation in the United States; and a work of mourning for a world disappearing into climate emergency. The second volume, currently in progress, begins in 2018.

Eternal thanks to Lachlan J. McDougall for bringing 2013–2017 into the world and to Taylor Baldwin for the cover image.

Fest, Bradley J--Cover for 2013-2017--spread

Summer and Fall 2023 Links

December 20, 2023December 20, 2023 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Manfred Laber, Zeitpyramide (1932-3183), concrete, 9.2 x 15 meters, Wemding, Germany.

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.”

Continue reading →

MLA 2024: Twenty-First-Century Forms

September 13, 2023September 13, 2023 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

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)

Continue reading →

“Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis” in boundary 2

May 26, 2023May 26, 2023 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

I am honored to say that my interview with the great poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” has just been published in the most recent issue of boundary 2. (This link should provide access for three months.) I am deeply grateful to DuPlessis for corresponding with me during the summer of 2020. In lockdown with no childcare, corresponding with DuPlessis via email to conduct this interview (when I had a spare moment or two to do so) played a large part in keeping me sane during that difficult time. A huge thanks also to Racheal and Aviva, who were right there every day along with me while this interview was being conducted.

Here’s an abstract of the interview:

This interview with poet, essayist, literary critic, and collagist Rachel Blau DuPlessis was conducted via email correspondence between June 11 and August 29, 2020. Author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen books in modernist studies, poetics, and feminist criticism, DuPlessis reflects broadly on her career in this interview. She discusses the ongoing role of feminism in her writing and thought, the forms of the fold and the fragment, the relationship between her poetry and criticism, her work in and on the long poem, and her post‐Drafts poetry, including her (at the time) most recent book, Late Work (2020). The interview concludes with a conversation about the relationship between poetry and theorizing practices and a meditation on writing during a global pandemic.

For my writing on DuPlessis: “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”

And for previous interviews: “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” and “An Interview with Jonathan Arac.”

“Twenty-First-Century Forms” at MLA 2023

February 16, 2022February 17, 2022 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

_{Richard Grossman, Torah Ball, 2011. Corundum sphere 5″ in diameter inscribed in Hebrew with the Ten Commandments currently buried inside Mount Princeton, Colorado, USA.}

Given my ongoing interest in megatexts and other emerging hybrid and transmedia forms, I am organizing a second panel on emergent literary forms of the twenty-first-century for the 2023 Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, California (the first was at the 2021 MLA Convention). Please consider submitting an abstract to festb[at]hartwick[dot]edu by March 24, 2022. Here’s the CFP:

Twenty-First-Century Forms

If the novel and lyric poem might be considered residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in the twenty-first century? Panel on emergent literary forms: transmedia, digital, hybrid, remediated, megatexts, other. 250-word abstract, brief bio.

“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis” in Genre

June 7, 2021June 21, 2021 / Bradley J. Fest / 1 Comment

Courtney Jacobs and James Zeigler, eds., “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women, Part 1” special issue, Genre 54, no. 1 (April 2021).

My essay, “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” has been published in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 54, no. 1 (April 2021): 139–65. This issue is the first of two special issues on “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women,” edited by Courtney Jacobs and James Zeigler. The second issue will be released in July 2021. I also have an interview with DuPlessis forthcoming in boundary 2. I’ve included an abstract of my essay below, along with a table of contents.

I am particularly proud of this essay, as I wrote it predominantly during the summer of 2020–the height of lockdown–and during which we had no childcare and I couldn’t access the library nor my campus office, including its books. Lots of people to thank, consequently, but particularly Racheal Fest, Courtney Jacobs and James Zeigler for their hard work putting this together during an incredibly difficult year, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Dawn Baker, Hartwick’s interlibrary loan librarian. (There are more acknowledgments on the first page of my essay.) This essay is also the second published chapter from my work in progress, Too Big to Read: The Megatext in the Twenty-First-Century. For other related work on megatexts and hyperarchivalism, see:

“Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper.’”

“Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature.”

“Coda: Writing Briefly about Really Big Things.”

“The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar.”

“The Megatext and Neoliberalism.”

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis’s various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis’s work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext’s phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

“Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women, Part 1,” Genre 54, no. 1 (April 2021).

James Zeigler, “Introduction: Big Novel Ambition without Apology.”

Maaheen Ahmed and Shiamin Kwa, “‘Kill the Monster!”: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and the Big, Ambitious (Graphic) Novel.”

Patricia Stuelke, “Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon: Lost Children Archive‘s Reenactment Play.”

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, “Two Paths for the Big Book: Olga Tokarczuk’s Shifting Voice.”

Marjorie Worthington, “‘We’ll Make Magic’: Zen Writers and Autofictional Readers in A Tale for the Time Being.”

Siân White, “A ‘Hair-Trigger Society’ and the Woman Who Felt Something in Anna Burn’s Milkman.”

Bradley J. Fest, “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”