“2016.09,” a poem from my sonnet sequence, is in amberflora.
Bradley J. Fest
“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).
Spring Semester 2018: Syllabi
I am beginning my second semester teaching English and creative writing at Hartwick College this week. Here are the syllabi for my two spring classes.
“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.)
“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.”
“2015.05” and “2015.06” in Epigraph Magazine
Two more sonnets from my ongoing sequence, “2015.05” and “2015.06,” were just published in no. 16 of Epigraph Magazine. A .pdf of the issue can be found here.
Guest Appearance on The Jabsteps: Talking about the 2017 NBA Finals
With Salvatore Pane still out of town, I made another guest appearance on The Jabsteps. In episode 58, “How Much Is There to Actually Say about These NBA Finals,” I talk with Geoff Peck about the 2017 NBA Finals and the seemingly inevitable Warrior’s victory (and generational dominance); I also help clarify “the desert of the real.”
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
I 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.
The Shape of Things, Forthcoming from Salò Press
I am happy to announce that my second volume of poetry, The Shape of Things, will be published this summer by Salò Press. More details to come.


