I have a collaborative essay, “Coda: Writing Briefly about Really Big Things,” in Joseph A. Dane‘s new book, Begging the Question: Critical Reasoning in Chaucer Studies, Book History, and Humanistic Inquiry (Mythodologies II) (Marymount Institute Press, 2019). Though brief, it speaks to some of the ongoing concerns in my megatext project, particularly how to situate the project in the field and in conversation with others. My thanks to Dane for inviting me to collaborate with him on this and including my piece in his book.
Publications
“2016.35” in Nerve Cowboy
“2016.35,” a poem from my sonnet sequence, is in issue forty-five of Nerve Cowboy.
“2016.04” in the Breakwater Review
“2016.04,” a poem from my sonnet sequence, is in issue twenty-four of the Breakwater Review.
“2016.09” in amberflora
“2016.09,” a poem from my sonnet sequence, is in amberflora.
“Reading Now and Again” in CounterText
My essay, “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents,” has been published in CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary in the the second of two special issues devoted to Ghosh and Miller’s book. The first issue is available here, and the second has an interview with Miller available from behind the paywall. I’ve included an abstract of my essay below, along with a table of contents.
Abstract: This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke UP, 2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and Miller’s differing methods for approaching literary study in the twenty-first century: undiscriminating catholicity and rhetorical reading, respectively. Through emblematic readings of David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011), the videogame Katamari Damacy (2004), and Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now (2016), this essay argues that Thinking Literature across Continents self-reflexively models and performs the interested, situated reading practices necessary for continuing the never-ending project of encountering, sharing, accounting for, learning from, and contending with others and their divergent readings, practices that, though many may have lost sight of them today, are fundamental to the project of democracy itself.
“Thinking Literature Across . . . II,” special issue, CounterText, table of contents:
Ivan Callus and James Corby, “Editorial.”
J. Hillis Miller, Ivan Callus, and James Corby, “The CounterText Interview: J. Hillis Miller.”
Bradley J. Fest, “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents.”
Simona Sawhney, “Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature.”
Jakob Lothe, “The Author’s Ethical Responsibility and the Ethics of Reading.”
Jonathan Locke Hart, “Ideas of Poetics and the Close Reading of Poetry.”
Shaobo Xie, “Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside.”
Kirk Kenny and James Corby, “Screens of Fortune: A Photo-Essay.”
Timothy Mathews, “The Many Hands of Thick Time: William Kentridge at the Whitechapel Gallery.”
“2016.15” in Likely Red
“2016.15,” another sonnet from my ongoing sequence, was published today in the online journal Likely Red.
“Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” in Reading Inside Out
Shortly following the completion of my dissertation, in the summer of 2013 I had the great honor and privilege to interview one of the preeminent literary critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, J. Hillis Miller. That interview was published as “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” in the fall 2014 issue of boundary 2.
The interview has been reprinted in Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations, a collection of interviews with Miller spanning the latter part of his career, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot and recently published by Sussex Academic Press. (The book is also available at a fairly reasonable price on Amazon.com.) In the table of contents below, I’ve provided links to where the other interviews in the volume were originally published (to the best of my ability).
Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations, by J. Hillis Miller
Table of Contents
David Jonathan Y. Bayot, “Preface.”
J. Hillis Miller, “Introduction.”
Imre Salusinszky, “Criticism in Society” (1987).
Gary A. Olson, “Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Critical Theory” (1994).
Fengzhen Wang and Shaobo Xie, “Stay! Speak, Speak. I Charge Thee, Speak” (2002).
Julian Wolfreys, “The Degree Zero of Criticism” (2004) and “Why Literature? A Profession” (2005).
Anfeng Sheng, “Literary Studies in Contexts” (2006).
Constanza del Río Álvaro and Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, “On Literature and Ethics” (2006).
Éamonn Dunne, “For the Reader to Come” (2010).
Éamonn Dunne, Michael O’Rourke, Martin McQuillan, Graham Allen, Dragan Kujundžić, and Nicholas Royle, “You See You Ask an Innocent Question and You’ve Got a Long Answer” (2014).
Bradley J. Fest, “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day?” (2014).
Christopher D. Morris, “A Critical Story So Far” (2015).
“2014.07,” “2014.08,” “2015.03,” “2015.07,” and “2015.08” in The Airgonaut
“2014.07,” “2014.08,” “2015.03,” “2015.07,” and “2015.08,” five more sonnets from my ongoing sequence, are in the February issue of the online journal, The Airgonaut. (The poems were posted as a .pdf to preserve the formatting of the poems’ footnotes; a link here.)
Special Issues of CounterText on Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents
I have written an essay, “Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents,” which will appear in the spring issue of CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary, the second of two special issues devoted to Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke UP, 2016). I’ll provide more information about this essay at a later date.
In the meantime, the first issue of CounterText addressing Ghosh and Miller‘s book (vol. 3, no. 3) is now available. Additionally, a conversation between Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, and the two authors opening the special issue is available from behind the journal’s paywall.
“Thinking Literature Across . . .,” special issue, CounterText, table of contents:
Marjorie Perloff, J. Hillis Miller, Charles Bernstein. and Ranjan Ghosh, “The CounterText Conversation: Thinking Literature. . . .”
Maria Margaroni, “Dialogics, Diacritics, Diasporics: Ranjan Ghosh, J. Hillis Miller, and the Becoming-Now of Theory.”
Georges Van Den Abbeele, “Literary Intransigence: Between J. Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh.”
Claire Colebrook, “Crossing Continents.”
Steven Yao, “How Many Ways of Thinking Literature across Continents?”
Pramod K. Nayar, “Literature/Ethics/Reading.”
Susana Onega, “Thinking English Literature and Criticism under the Transmodern Paradigm.”
Lene M. Johannessen, “Poetics of Peril.”
Adrian Grima and Ivan Callus, “Irreverent and Inventive Mamo.”
Juann Mamo, “Nanna Venut’s Children in America: Two Chapters from the First English Translation,” trans. Albert Gatt.
Ivan Callus, “Literature, Journalism, and the Countertextual: Daphne Caruana Galizia, 1964–2017.”
Mario Aquilina, review of Essayism and the Return of the Essay, by Brian Dillon.
“Toward a Theory of the Megatext” in Scale in Literature and Culture
The first essay from my new project on unreadably large texts, “Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper,'” has been published in Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), edited by Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg. The book includes essays by Bruno Latour and Mark McGurl. You can find the entire collection here through Springer Link if you have institutional access, or individual essays via the links below. The book is also available on Amazon. I’m happy to send along a copy of my essay to anyone who is interested (festb[at]hartwick[dot]edu).
Table of Contents for Scale in Literature and Culture
Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg, Introduction.
Scale: History and Conception
Zach Horton, “Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene.”
Derek Woods, “Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten.“
Scale in Culture
Mark McGurl, “Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong.“
Joan Lubin, “The Stature of Man: Population Bomb on Spaceship Earth.”
Aikaterini Antonopoulou, “Large-Scale Fakes: Living in Architectural Reproductions.”
Scale in Literature
Melody Jue, “From the Goddess Ganga to a Teacup: On Amitav Ghosh’s Novel The Hungry Tide.“
Oded Nir, “World Literature as a Problem of Scale.”
Bradley J. Fest, “Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper.'”
Jeffrey Severs, “Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 