“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.

Bruno Latour, “Anti-Zoom.”

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.”

New Position at Hartwick College

I am delighted to announce that I have accepted the position of Assistant Professor of English at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, where I will be teaching creative writing, poetry, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States literature and culture. I will be joining Hartwick’s English Department this fall and will be teaching three classes: Introduction to Creative Writing (ENGL 213), Reading Modern Poetry (ENGL 250), and Creative Writing: Poetry (ENGL 312). I am really excited about this new chapter in my life and career. Thanks to all those–too numerous to name–who have supported me along the way; your indefatigable encouragement has meant so much.

Guest Appearance on The Jabsteps

Image result for the jabstepsI had the great pleasure to be a guest on The Jabsteps, a podcast about the NBA hosted by Geoff Peck and Salvatore Pane. I appear in episode 55, “Zaza Sullies the WCF but Kristaps Saves MSG (and Harden’s Still MIA),” where we talk about a lot of things, including Pane’s new videogame. It also looks like I’ll be filling in on another episode or two in the coming weeks, and expect Peck and I to talk about Brian Windhorst and Dave McMenamin’s new book, Return of the King: LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the Greatest Comeback in NBA History (2017), and, of course, the inevitable telos of this NBA season, Cavs v. Warriors III.