The start to this academic year is again unconventional, but feeling much closer to normal, especially owing to Hartwick College’s reopening plans. I’m again teaching two frequently taught creative writing courses and revisiting Poetry and Technology. The syllabi:
ENGL 213 Introduction to Creative Writing
Black Lives Matter
Ishmael Reed, “America’s Criminal Justice System and Me.”
Anthony Bogues, “Black Lives Matter and the Moment of the Now.”
Colin Dayan, “Police Power and Can’t Breathe.”
Dwight Garner, “Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ about Our Abiding Sin.”
Jane Hu, “The Second Act of Social-Media Activism.”
Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson, “Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles to Grab Protesters off Portland Streets.”
Shane Harris, “DHS Compiled ‘Intelligence Reports’ on Journalists Who Published Leaked Documents.”
Ken Klippenstein, “The Border Patrol Was Responsible for an Arrest in Portland.”
Katie Shepherd and Mark Berman, “‘It Was Like Being Preyed upon’: Portland Protesters Say Federal Officers in Unmarked Vans Are Detaining Them.”
Charlie Warzel, “50 Nights of Unrest in Portland.”
Conrad Wilson, Dirk Vanderhart, and Suzanne Nuyen, “Oregon Sues Federal Agencies for Grabbing up Protesters off the Streets.”
Gillian Flaccus, “Judge Blocks US Agents from Arresting Observers in Portland.”
Richard Read, “Out of Portland Tear Gas, an Apparition Emerges, Capturing the Imagination of Protesters.”
I had the privilege of meeting Richard Siken when I was quite young–an undergraduate at the University of Arizona–and he gave me lots of good advice on the poetry world (and life), conversations I still cherish. Please help him out.
Stroke Recovery Fund for Poet Richard Siken.
Nuclear and Environmental
Alenka Zupančič, “The Apocalypse Is (Still) Disappointing.”
James Livingston, “Time, Dread, Apocalypse Now.
Ted Nordhaus, “The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse.”
Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin, eds., Apocalypse, special issue of ASAP/Journal.
Frame, Apocalypse.
Brad Plumer, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace.”
Damian Carrington, “Why The Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.”
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.”
Nuclear and Environmental
Tim Fernholz, “US Nuclear Tests Killed Far More Civilians than We Knew.”
Democracy Now, “Daniel Ellsberg Reveals He Was a Nuclear War Planner, Warns of Nuclear Winter and Global Starvation.”
Daniel Bessner, “On the Brink.”
Alastair Tancred, “A Nuclear First Strike of North Korea Is ‘Tempting’, Says Legendary US Diplomat Henry Kissinger as Kim Jong-un Warns Trump Is Pushing Toward War.”
“Senator Markey Blasts Trump Administration’s Reckless Nuclear Posture Review.”
Helena Feder, “The Realism of Our Time: Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.”
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.
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 extra hour today means I have time to post some links. There are many, as it’s been a while.
Nuclear and Environment
“Lockheed Announces Breakthrough on Nuclear Fusion Energy.”
Matthew L. Wald, “Calls to Use Yucca Mountain as a Nuclear Waste Site, Now Deemed Safe.”
Rizwan Asghar, “Illicit Nuclear Trafficking.”
“Emergency Agencies Practice Response to Nuclear Explosion in Times Square.” (Didn’t DeLillo have something to say about this kind of thing . . . ?)
Jonathan Tirone, “U.S. Said to Join Russia in Blocking Nuclear Safety Moves.”
“Notice to Congress: Continuation of the National Emergency on Russian Fissile Material.”
Darren Boyle, “Inside China’s Top Secret Nuclear Bunker: Cold War Relic Built into a Mountain to Fend off Soviet Attack Is Now a Tourist Attraction.” (Thanks to Terrence Ross for a lot of the above links.)
“Asgard’s Fire,” on thorium reactors.
Ari Phillips, “New Study Details Alarming Acceleration in Sea Rise.”
Nuclear
More adventures in nuclear incompetence (feeling like a broken record). David Willman, “$40-Billion Missile Defense System Proves Unreliable.”
The inverted nuke in the garden (seriously, a broken record) . . . : Dylan Matthews, “A New Report Shows Nuclear Weapons Almost Detonated in North Carolina in 1961.”
Alex Wellerstein found this, wow, simply amazing document: assessing post-apocalyptic land values.
Iraq
Robin Wright, “A Third Iraq War?”
Lawrence Wright, “ISIS’s Savage Strategy in Iraq.”
Elliot Ackerman, “Watching ISIS Flourish Where We Once Fought.”
Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin, “Massacre Claim Shakes Iraq.”
Rod Nordland and Suadad Al-Salhay, “Extremists Attack Iraq’s Biggest Oil Refinery.”
David Frum, “Iraq Isn’t Ours to Save.”
J. M. Berger, “How ISIS Games Twitter.”
Moíses Naím, “The Rise of Militarized NGOs.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The New Map of the Middle East.”
And Greg Shupak at Jacobin, “No More Imperial Crusades.”
It’s been a busy month, both in the news and in the world. Here’s a few things I’ve almost had time to read.
Nuclear and Disaster
“Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,” Eric Schlosser, The New Yorker.
The state of emergency in West Virginia and its long term effects.
The NSA
NSA has a backdoor into your computer and to your iPhone.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 