Last night, for the Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY, I read “The Shape of Things II,” a long poem concluding my recently published collection The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017). Here is a link to the recording.
Bradley J Fest
Reading at Hartwick College on November 16
To welcome me as a new faculty member in the Department of English at Hartwick College, I have been invited to give a reading from my new book, The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), on Thursday, November 16 at 7:00 pm as part of the Visiting Writers Series. The reading will take place in the Eaton Lounge of Bresee Hall, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY. One of my students at Hartwick, Chelsea Jacobson, will be reading some poems as well.
The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar
Next week I will be presenting a paper on a panel titled “The Power of Digital Talk” at the 2017 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, November 9-12. The abstract for the paper is below.
Thursday, November 9, Session 1 2:00-3:30pm: 1E “The Power of Digital Talk”
Chair: Julie Funk
“The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar,” Bradley J. Fest, Hartwick College.
“A Tech-Lover’s Discourse: Roland Barthes, Longing, Loss, and Separation Anxiety in Non-Use Discourse,” Julie Funk, University of Waterloo, Critical Media Lab.
“World Wide Walden: Toward a Thoreauvian Ethics of Screen Time,” John Tinnell, University of Colorado.
The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar
With the disastrous effects of rising atmospheric carbon becoming increasingly observable and the relentless pace of neoliberal capital pursuing ever-increasing profit, the twenty-first century appears to be a time of dark accumulation. Increasingly, the risks facing the overdeveloped world stem not from absence but from overwhelming presence: everywhere there is a problem of too much. And it appears that such horrifying accumulation goes for contemporary experiences of time as well. An author known, perhaps most famously, for exploring spatial and textual accumulation, Mark Z. Danielewski’s new project, The Familiar (2015–), a twenty-seven-volume serial novel in progress, turns his attention to the multiplying temporalities of the Anthropocene. From the deep time of its cosmic frame tale and the shifting temporalities of globalization experienced by its cosmopolitan characters, to its confrontation with planetarity and its bi-annual, serialized release sc
hedule, The Familiar asks its readers to confront what it means to live in and at too many times. In this paper I will explore The Familiar as an example of what I call a megatext—an unreadably large yet concrete aesthetic and rhetorical transmedia object, produced and conceived as a singular work, and which depends upon digital technology and collaborative authorship for its production—and argue that Danielewski’s massive novel emerges from and responds to a world in which time is no longer out of joint, but overwhelmingly and catastrophically multiple.
For a previous paper on The Familiar, delivered at the 2016 Society for Novel Studies Conference, see my “The Megatext and Neoliberalism.” (This links to my academia.edu page.)
“2016.11,” “2016.13,” “2016.20,” “2016.24,” and “2016.25” in HVTN
“2016.11,” “2016.13,” “2016.20,” “2016.24,” and “2016.25,” five more sonnets from my ongoing sequence, are in vol. 3, no. 2 of HVTN. The issue can be ordered for £5.99 here.
Pre-order Scale in Literature and Culture and Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations, by J. Hillis Miller
Two new books are available for pre-order in which I have contributions.
Scale in Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg, and including essays by Bruno Latour and Mark McGurl, can now be ordered from Palgrave Macmillan. My contribution is the first part of my new project on megatexts: “Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper.'”
J. Hillis Miller’s Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot, is forthcoming from Sussex Academic Press and reprints my interview with Professor Miller from 2014, “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day?,” originally published in boundary 2.
Both books are also available on Amazon (here and here). (As both are also potentially prohibitively expensive, please do not hesitate to contact me requesting the essay or interview.)
Hartwick College Issues a Press Release about The Shape of Things
Hartwick College, where I am currently assistant professor of English, has issued a press release in which I am quoted as saying various things about my new book, The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017).
The Shape of Things
The Shape of Things, my second book of poetry, is now available and shipping from Salò Press. Order it here if you’re in the UK and here if you are anywhere else. I am very proud of this book.
Bradley J. Fest’s second volume of poetry, The Shape of Things, continues his project of poetic assemblage. Written in an age of ubiquitous algorithmic surveillance and increasingly catastrophic climate change, these poems both describe the shape of things in the overdeveloped world and endeavor to challenge the widespread feeling that the imagination has been foreclosed in the twenty-first century. An ambivalent hyperarchive, the collection draws influence from a number of seemingly incompatible lyric registers, including the language of contemporary theory. The Shape of Things culminates in an eponymous long poem that asks if a poiesis of “network being” is possible and suggests that there might be some other way to dance to the sounds of our present.
If Whitman and Adorno had a knife fight on the ruins of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, The Shape of Things would be the perfect voice over. Which is to say, though it’s not a pretty scene, there’s pleasure and beauty to be found in the action and music of the syntax and in following the wild movements of this poet’s mind. Truly original, dazzlingly smart and game for anything, Fest writes of lives and desires torn apart by the neoliberal security state. Jolting between paranoiac rage and orgasmic bliss, between all- out negation and Wordsworthian swoon, these poems describe the awful implications of a contemporary moment in which “we have made ourselves a gallows of a house.”
–Sten Carlson, author of Fur & After
To call The Shape of Things “post-apocalyptic” would be a mistake: its poignant present tense anxiety unfolds in the apocalypse now. Ataris and hunter-gatherers lean together over the edge of time, commingling in harrowing yet pleasurable ways. But this is no book of “detached mirth.” Hear in Fest’s singing the quiet pathos of humans and machines out of time. While Fest’s human creatures have lulled themselves into submission—”There may be something (virtually) / on fire. More likely our expectations are being met . . .”—his work nudges middle class late capitalist culture awake into the disturbing awareness that “a prolonged adolescence is the shape of things.”
–Robin Clark, author of Lines the Quarry
Fall Semester 2017: Syllabi
I am beginning my first semester teaching English and creative writing at Hartwick College tomorrow. Here are the syllabi for my three classes.
ENGL 213: Introduction to Creative Writing
The Shape of Things Available for Pre-Order
My second volume of poetry, The Shape of Things, is now available for pre-order from Salò Press. It will begin shipping September 1, 2017.
Fall Semester 2017
I am looking forward to my first fall semester at Hartwick College. I’ll be teaching three classes: Introduction to Creative Writing (ENGL 213); Reading Modern Poetry (ENGL 250); and Creative Writing: Poetry (ENGL 312). This semester is especially exciting because I will be returning to the creative writing classroom, and, I mean, look at all this poetry:
I’ll post syllabi when they’re complete. No class blogs this semester, but probably soon, especially if I do something new this spring.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 