Because I am the 2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English, I again have a course release this spring. As such, I’ll only be teaching one class this semester, but I’m super excited to teach ENGL 352 Critical Game Studies again.
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.
Robert 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
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.”
“2023.15–16” in Osmosis
I have a new (double) sonnet, “2023.15–16,” in Osmosis.
“2023.07–08” and “2023.10” in Pere Ube
I’m thrilled to have new sonnets from my ongoing sequence, “2023.07–08” and “2023.10,” in the new avant-garde journal Pere Ube.
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)
Fall Semester 2023: Syllabi
Looking forward to another busy fall semester at Hartwick College with four courses I have taught before. I’m especially excited to be returning to the ENGL 190 Introduction to Textual Analysis classroom.
ENGL 190 Introduction to Textual Analysis
ENGL 213 Introduction to Creative Writing
Hartwick College’s Faculty Lecture Series, Fall 2023
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.
Tessa Yang, “Two Truths and a Lie: Research in Fiction,” Friday, September 8, 2023.
Mark Kuhlmann, “The Uncommon Octopus: The Ecology of Octopus insularis at San Salvador Island, The Bahamas,” Friday, October 13, 2023.
Michael Branch, “Tuning In: Policing Rural Upstate New York through Police Radio Scanners,” Friday, November 10, 2023.
For more information, visit the Faculty Lecture Series webpage.
“Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis” in boundary 2
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 