MLA 2023

For this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, to be held January 5–8, 2023 in San Francisco, California, I organized and will be speaking on a roundtable on Twenty-First-Century Forms, along with Daniel Burns, Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, Kathryn Harlan-Gran, Kevin Pyon, and Elizabeth Sotelo. I have included the information about the panel and, below that, full abstracts from each speaker.

197. Twenty-First-Century Forms

Friday, January 6, 2023, 8:30–9:45 a.m. (PST)

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: film, documentary, social media, publishing platforms, transmedia, autotheory, and other hybrid narrative and poetic forms.

Speakers
Dan Burns (Elon University)
Bradley J. Fest (Hartwick College)
Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth (The University of Texas at Austin)
Kathryn Harlan-Gran (Cornell University)
Kevin Pyon (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg)
Elizabeth Sotelo (University of Oregon)

Presiding
Bradley Fest (Hartwick College)

Continue reading →

_{Richard Grossman, Torah Ball, 2011. Corundum sphere 5″ in diameter inscribed in Hebrew with the Ten Commandments currently buried inside Mount Princeton, Colorado, USA.}

Given my ongoing interest in megatexts and other emerging hybrid and transmedia forms, I am organizing a second panel on emergent literary forms of the twenty-first-century for the 2023 Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, California (the first was at the 2021 MLA Convention). Please consider submitting an abstract to festb[at]hartwick[dot]edu by March 24, 2022. Here’s the CFP:

Twenty-First-Century Forms

If the novel and lyric poem might be considered residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in the twenty-first century? Panel on emergent literary forms: transmedia, digital, hybrid, remediated, megatexts, other. 250-word abstract, brief bio.