Other reflections on Rachel Blau DuPlessis are beginning to appear, so I’ll gather them here (and add more as I find them).
Gary Miles, “Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Experimental Poet, Literary Scholar, and Temple Professor Emerita, Has Died at 84.”
The Journal of Modern Literature, “A Tribute to Rachel Blau Duplessis (1941-2026).”
So this “now”
now emerges, shadows be-fallen here,
and we debate
how vast the eulogy we need.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Entanglements: a representation”
The zone between the living voice
and the posthumous voice
is poetry.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The moon and modulations of lonely”
I am so very deeply saddened by the passing of Rachel Blau DuPlessis on September 2, 2026.[1] After hearing from her partner, Robert DuPlessis, I found myself weeping in my office for nearly a half hour last week, staggered by the magnitude of losing her. And so I wanted to write a little about how I got to know Rachel and her work, hoping it might provide a small glimpse into just how incredible a person, artist, and scholar/critic she was and the kind of massive positive effect she had on the people around her, even to someone who was only lightly connected to her.
***
Continue reading
Thanks to Justin A. Sider for inviting me to write a review of Conrad Steel‘s excellent new book, The Poetics of Scale: From Apollinaire to Big Data (University of Iowa Press, 2024). The piece was just published in issue 59, volume 2 of Genre and should be free to read for at least three months.
At this year’s Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles, California (January 7-10, 2027), I will be speaking on a roundtable Teaching Literary Maximalism: Problems, Practices, Possibilities, and a panel, Real Aesthetic Questions. I have included the information and tentative abstracts for each paper below.
23. Teaching Literary Maximalism: Problems, Practices, Possibilities
Thursday, January 7, 2027, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Presiding: Benjamin Bergholtz (Louisiana Tech U) and Yonina Hoffman (US Merchant Marine Acad.)
Speakers:
Carole Carroll (Lubbock Christian U)
Srirupa Chatterjee (Indian Inst. of Tech., Hyderabad)
Bradley J. Fest (Hartwick C)
Alexander McKee (U of Delaware, Newark)
Stefan H. Uhlig (U of California, Davis)
Yanchang Zhu (Huzhou C)
Teaching Megatexts
In a monograph currently under peer review, Too Big to Read: The Megatext in the Twenty-First Century, I argue that the massive yet discrete textual objects that have appeared across media in the last thirty or so years should be considered a distinct, emergent form, what I call the megatext. From three-million-page conceptual works to massive cinematic universes and gigantic video games, the twenty-first century has seen megatexts appear across media. Megatexts are unreadably large yet concrete aesthetic and rhetorical objects that require incredibly nontrivial effort to completely traverse; they are produced and conceived as singular works and depend upon digital technology and collaborative authorship for their production. In my talk, I will focus on the specific challenges and possibilities presented by devoting an entire semester to studying a text that is “too big to read.”
I will be focusing on two classes of mine at Hartwick College, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York: a senior seminar for English majors in the fall of 2024, ENGL 470 Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar; and an upper division course for English and game development majors I taught in the spring of 2026, ENGL 352 Critical Game Studies. ENGL 470 was devoted to studying Danielewski’s failed megatext, The Familiar (2015–17), and putting it in conversation with other relevant texts, including Lost (2004–10), Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy (2024), criticism of the novel, and texts chosen by students. ENGL 352 is a course I have taught before, but instead of looking closely at six games over the course of the semester, this spring I will ask students to spend the entire semester playing Final Fantasy XIV (2010–) as a grounding touchstone for the class’s more general introduction to the field of game studies.
My main focus in “Teaching Megatexts” will be on the inherently and necessarily collaborative nature of teaching and learning that occurs between students and instructor when a megatext is brought into the classroom. As I argue in Too Big to Read, megatexts are collaborative both in terms of authorship (they cannot be made by a single person alone) and in terms of criticism and reception (they need to be read, played, and watched collectively; they require collective criticism). As such, the classroom is a perfect place to explore the limits and affordances of collaborative reading, playing, teaching, and learning. In ENGL 470, my class kept a collective blog that asked them to put their readings in conversation with one another and to give group presentations on relevant texts of their choosing that they also assigned to the class. In ENGL 352, students spent time each week teaming up to play Final Fantasy XIV. “Teaching Megatexts” will thus theorize how the classroom changes and what kinds of different pedagogy is necessary when the object of critical analysis grows beyond the ability of any single student (or instructor) to know it in its entirety.
490. Real Aesthetic Questions
Saturday, January 9, 2027, 10:15-11:30 a.m.
Presiding: Nan Z. Da (Johns Hopkins U, MD)
Presentations:
Light’s Speech: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris
What does light sound like? How would it speak? What would it say? How might one bring its presence into language? How might language be luminous? These fundamentally aesthetic questions appear to motivate many of the poems in Nobel Laureate Louise Glück’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection The Wild Iris (1992). Written at a moment when light speaking via optical pulses along fiberoptic communication cables was about to reconfigure global communication and archival memory, solidifying the formation of what Fest has elsewhere called the optical society, Glück’s poems must strike us, read from our moment of ubiquitous, enrapturing digital luminosity, as wonderfully, importantly aesthetic, as analog and nonarchival, providing moments of seeing, reading, hearing, representing, and imagining light outside and against the twenty-first-century optical regime and its hyperarchival fever. Perhaps even more importantly, light in The Wild Iris is not immaterial or ephemeral but wonderfully material, embodied in plants and soil, traced through earth and sky, while simultaneously still curiously transient in the way only something that is both particle and wave can be, “white light / no longer disguised as matter.”[1] Ultimately arguing that Glück inaugurates something like a luminous poetics or a luminous literary aesthetics that many other contemporary poets across traditions have taken up in The Wild Iris’s wake, this paper will also be the first foray into a larger new book project tentatively titled Literary Light.
For previous essays of mine on megatexts and unreadable texts, see:
“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”
“Writing Briefly about Really Big Things.”
Notes
[1] Louise Glück, “End of Summer,” in The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992), 41.
At this year’s Modern Language Association Convention in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (January 8-11, 2026), I will be speaking on a roundtable Aesthetics, Politics, and Ecological Overshoot, and panel, Comics as Physical Objects. I have included the information and tentative abstracts for each paper below.
52. Comics as Physical Objects
Thursday, January 8, 2026, 1:45-3:00 p.m.
Presiding: Edward Whitley (Lehigh U)
Presentations:
1. “A Queer Print History of Comics,” Margaret Galvan (U of Florida)
2. “The Comics Megatext: Floppies, Trades, Marvel Unlimited, Podcasts, and The X-Men,” Bradley Fest (Hartwick C)
3. “Multimedia and Digital Materialities: The Blue Age of (Web) Comics and Fostering Multimodal Literacy,” Devon Harvey (Queen’s U)
4. “Framing Matter: Materiality and the Medium of Comics,” Christina Kraenzle (York U)
This panel has been arranged by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.
The Comics Megatext: Floppies, Trades, Marvel Unlimited, Podcasts, and The X-Men
As Douglas Wolk recently pointed out in his book about reading all of Marvel Comics, “The twenty-seven thousand or so superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created.”[1] Though a bit smaller, the over six thousand comics that constitute The X-Men (1963–) also makes it one of the longest narratives ever written. Both are what I call in my current book project megatexts: a massively unreadable twenty-first century form created through collaboration and digital technology to achieve a scale beyond what a single author could do alone and that requires incredibly nontrivial effort on the part of readers to completely traverse. In this talk, I will explore the emergence of comics as a megatextual object in the twenty-first century. In the age of floppies and trades, comics megatexts were largely inaccessible in their totality. With the emergence of platforms such as Marvel Unlimited and paratextual forms like podcasts such as Jay and Miles X-Plain “The X-Men” (2014–), we can now read comics megatexts as megatexts. For all intents and purposes, then, the comics megatext has newly emerged as an accessible and thus coherent form that, like other megatexts, also importantly calls forth collective and creative reading and criticism. Approached in this way, The X-Men in particular offers us a continuously transforming megatextual object that is also a beacon for collaboratively exploring how to build alternative communities and ways of thinking and being for an infowhelming world.
[1] Douglas Wolk, All the Marvels: A Journey to the End of the Biggest Story Ever Told (New York: Penguin, 2021), 1.
602. Aesthetics, Politics, and Ecological Overshoot
Sunday, January 11, 2026, 10:15-11:30 a.m.
Presiding: John Maerhofer (Rutgers U, New Brunswick)
Speakers: Federico Correa Pose (U of Southern California)
Bradley Fest (Hartwick C)
Christopher Gortmaker (U of Chicago)
Brenda Odria Loayza (U of Toronto)
Pedro Gabriel Soares Daher (Maine C of Art and Design)
Megatextual Eco-Utopia: Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men and Mutant Poiesis
[That was the talk’s original proposed title. After writing the talk, its title is now “The Megatext as Overshoot Form: The Krakoan Era of The X-Men and Mutant Poiesis,” and its content differs significantly from what is below. I am happy to email the talk to anyone interested. Edit added on January 12, 2026.]
In 2019, in one of the more audacious reboots of a long-running megatextual franchise, Jonathan Hickman reimagined the now decades-long political aspirations of Marvel Comics’ X-Men (1963–) franchise in explicitly eco-utopian terms. Rather than continuing to pursue his decades-long dream of mutant and human peaceful coexistence, in House of X/Powers of X (2019) Professor X creates a separatist sovereign nation on the sentient living island Krakoa, an achieved utopia for all mutants. Notable even in its genre for its exploration of alternative presents and various futures, The X-Men franchise’s subsequent five-year pivot fleshes out the politics of a separatist utopia where no mutant dies and the dead are reborn. Despite the ecologically harmonious, sustainable technologies the mutant nation develops and despite their offer to share their miraculous, life-saving drugs and technology with the rest of the world, humans nonetheless turn toward the genocidal destruction of what appears the last, best hope for the continued flourishing for organic life on the planet. As such, Hickman’s eco-utopia emerges not from the dreams of the 1960s but from the despair of the present, a somewhat reactionary imaginary attempting to respond to the slow violence of climate change and the rise and resurgence of far-right, ecocidal extremism in the United States and around the world. Ultimately, however, the mutant survivors of Krakoa discover that their story was not one of separatist paradise gained but historical subjectivity achieved without the yoke of human bigotry and hatred, enabling them to build their world with others, crafting its institutions and practices, its culture and its politics—in short, mutant poiesis—the swift, violent destruction of which should serve as a warning for us in this moment of political destituency.
For previous essays of mine on megatexts and unreadable texts, see:
“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”
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).
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:
“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”
“Writing Briefly about Really Big Things.”
“The Megatext and Neoliberalism.”
“The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar.”
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.”
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)
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.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 