Publications

In this article, the authors contend that the podcast serves as an alternative method of conducting and pursuing academic research in an increasingly collaborative, increasingly global era. Circulating Spaces: Literary and Language Worlds in a Global Age, a podcast series created, produced, and published by the authors, acts as case study. The podcast models a complex network of relations by highlighting topics and featuring guests who co-exist within academic and “public” (often understood as non-academic) spaces. These networks help to reshape our understanding of the “publics” of academia by breaking down the binary between the public and academic. They point toward ways in which more nuanced networks of affinity between the academy and the public may be constructed and negotiated by embracing the digital and the open. This piece was co-authored by Christian Howard-Sukhil, Samantha Wallace, and Ankita Chakrabarti. The article is openly accessible.

The German writer W.G. Sebald provides a rare opportunity to examine collective experience as a unifying factor of the nationless, for he is well-known for his exploration of identity, history, and memory. Questions of identity are textually embodied in Sebald’s work through the inclusion of photographs and other images, which serve as remnants of the characters’ past lives and become relics that anchor the fictional world to the real. Yet even as his writing style is celebrated for its incorporation of material sources of the past, so too has this technique led to ethical debates about Sebald’s right to use such images. Sebald has defended his work through his authenticity and fidelity to the real, which is predicated on his very use of these relics and images. This essay argues that Sebald deliberately courts (mis)translation and plays with (in)authenticity in order to create a pervasive sense of displacement within his readers and exemplify universal historical experiences through an ethics of fact. This claim is supported through close readings of both the images and text of Sebald’s 1992 work, Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), as well as a careful examination of Sebald’s involvement with the English-language edition of this work.

The amateur writing community on Twitter, which is comprised of a transitory and shifting group of global writers and readers, is developing a literary form that is self-identified by its creators through the use of hashtags related to literary genre. While this literature may not align with literary forms defined by the academic community, the amateur writing community on Twitter is nonetheless creating a global network of literary output on a hitherto unprecedented scale, and the literature produced by this community is worth being preserved and studied by literary scholars. This article examines how such changes in literary output are affecting — and have been affected by — the alternative networks of circulation within these digital spaces.

William Faulkner included an appendix to Absalom, Absalom! consisting of a chronology, genealogy, and map; this was the only one of his novels originally published with such an appendix. Most scholars have regarded these end materials as supplementary materials, yet such views derive largely from editorial decisions, which have relegated the end materials to “mer[e] aids to the reader” rather than “modern adjuncts to the novel,” as Noel Polk puts it. Nonetheless, upon examining Faulkner’s correspondence with his editors housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, I reassess the hitherto supplementary status of these end materials. Rather than assessing them in terms of accuracy or inaccuracy, I argue that we should consider their content and form, free of the assumption that they are merely readerly “aids.” To this end, I offer a parallel between these end materials and Biblical chronologies and genealogies, which offer a viable means of understanding the operation of the chronology and genealogy within Faulkner’s storyworld.