Digital Theory, Inc.

Posted on January 16th, 2013
by FUPress

Review in Postmodern Culture, Vol. 22, No. 2, by Carol Colatrella

Review of Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

Rob Wilkie, The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, New York: Fordham UP, 2011.

Over the past year, faculty members in my interdisciplinary department at Georgia Tech responded to the request by an external review for improved descriptions of our programs and department. The process of strategic planning is inherited from the corporate world and is the most obvious way that academic institutions are being pressed to function better (i.e., more like corporations). My colleagues and I struggled to agree on the best description of our research and teaching, because we knew that the reputation and future configuration of the department were at stake. Recessionary university budgets meant that we had to be both accurate and persuasive in descriptions that would be read by various interest groups: our university colleagues; administrators, including our dean, provost, and president; former, current, and prospective students and their parents; employers of our graduates; the citizens and legislators of our state who underwrite part of the budget for our institution; and the various other funding agencies and donors who contribute to our research and curricular programs.

After considering what each faculty member does and relating it to the university’s recently issued strategic plan, we reached a consensus that our scholarship and curricular programs focus on culture and technology, and particularly on building and critiquing technologies, including technologies of representation. While agreeing on our core activities, however, we also recognized diverse affiliations with other disciplinary and interdisciplinary humanistic fields: rhetoric, literary criticism, creative writing, cinema studies, performance studies, and cultural studies of science and technology. Because it is impossible to be both universally transparent and cutting-edge, there are irresolvable, permanent tensions between our department’s general project and individual faculty members’ specific research; these tensions are reflected, furthermore, in the differences between our department’s configuration and those of similar departments in the state system and beyond.

Our experience of strategic planning represents what Katie King calls “networked reenactment” in building community-identity and embodies what Rob Wilkie describes as the necessary, if unpaid, labor to create culture. King’s and Wilkie’s respective books, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell and The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, both consider the economic forces affecting the creation, deployment, and consumption of technologies and related representations. Both books explain how macroeconomic processes affect scholarly work and undervalue it in the marketplace. Theoretically rigorous, these books are also highly pragmatic in recommending activism for social justice. Read more

Carol Colatrella
Georgia Institute of Technology
carol.colatrella@lcc.gatech.edu

Review in Postmodern Culture, Vol. 22, No. 2, by Carol Colatrella Review of Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Rob Wilkie, The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, New York: Fordham … Full Story →

COMPARATIVE MODERNISMS, MEDIALITIES, MODERNITIES

Posted on April 28th, 2012
by FUPress

New York University
NYU Silver Center
Jurow Hall, 1st floor
100 Washington Square East
NYC

May 4-5, 9:30am-7:30pm

____________________________________________________________________________________

Conference sponsored by Fordham University’s Comparative Literature Program, New York University’s Comparative Literature Department, Fordham University Press and the consortium of presses participating in the Modern Language Initiative. Funding generously provided by the Mellon-funded Modern Language Initiative and Fordham University Arts & Sciences Deans.

For information, visit www.modernlanguageinitiative.com

New York University NYU Silver Center Jurow Hall, 1st floor 100 Washington Square East NYC May 4-5, 9:30am-7:30pm ____________________________________________________________________________________ Conference sponsored by Fordham University’s Comparative Literature Program, New York University’s Comparative Literature Department, Fordham University Press and the consortium of … Full Story →

Protests, Petitions and Publishing

Posted on March 5th, 2012
by FUPress

Last week, FUP Director, Fredric Nachbaur, attended a panel at Columbia University. This was Columbia University’s Scholarly Communication Program’s third event this academic year in their speakers series, Research Without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication. The panel discussed how Occupy Wall Street, the Research Works Act (RWA), the boycott of Elsevier journals by a growing number of academics, and other recent developments are informing the debate over access to research and scholarship.

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) posted Fred’s recap of the event on the AAUP blog, The Digital Digest:

Is Academic Publishing in a Downward Zombie Death Spiral?

When I was invited to the panel “Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012,” I was on the fence about attending. Did I really want to spend two hours of my day hearing the debate on open access, anticipating that it would be filled with much controversy? Because it was close and I was confident that I would learn something, I made the short trek earlier this week from the Bronx to Morningside Heights, even scoring a parking spot in front of the Columbia building housing the event on a day on which alternate-side-of-the-street parking was in effect. The press release indicated that the event was meant to consider how Occupy Wall Street, the Research Works Act (RWA), the boycott of Elsevier journals by a growing number of academics, and other recent developments are informing the debate over access to research and scholarship on open access. The event was hosted by Columbia’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) and included a diverse panel of speakers. I’ll do my best to summarize the session based on my notes drafted the old school way on a notepad in barely legible handwriting. (This exercise made me realize that I need to embrace the iPad more.) The audio will be available shortly, so I will post a link on the Digital Digest when it is. The issues are complicated, and there are no easy answers as was evident by the talk on Monday. Alex Golub from the University of Hawaii called current publishing models a death spiral. As most of us know, the hard sciences are very different from the humanities. The AAUP made an official statement about three pieces of legislation related to research policies that have resulted in a flurry of mixed responses from university press directors. READ MORE

Kirkus Review: Loaded Words

Posted on February 29th, 2012
by FUPress

February 29, 2012

LOADED WORDS
By Marjorie Garber
304 pages
9780823242054, paperback, $26.00
Pub date: June 1, 2012

A vigorous, revealing collection about the pleasures and revelations of close reading, whether it involves words, books, biographies or ideas.

Renowned scholar Garber (English/Harvard Univ.; The Use and Abuse of Literature, 2011, etc.) is a deep thinker who never has to look far for inspiration—life and literature are full of untapped mysteries, and the more you slow down, the more you see. She finds large-scale drama in the small, abstract or arcane, reveling in how ordinary words keep secrets, how exclusive words (like genius) become clichés, how a rare edition of Hamlet can conceal hidden agendas and how historic figures become advertising “brands.” An essay on the word mad forges a credible connection between Mad magazine, the TV show Mad Men, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and that original mad man, Hamlet. Shakespeare recurs throughout the book; as she demonstrated in her massive guidebook Shakespeare After All (2004), he’s the lens through which Garber often sees the world. The same goes for the great critic F.O. Matthiessen, recalled here in a superb tribute focusing on how his background in Elizabethan studies prepared him to understand 19th-century American literature. The use of the phrase “honey trap” in newspaper accounts of Julian Assange’s rape trial leads to Winnie the Pooh and the possible anti-German bias of “hunny.” Tackling Coleridge’s “unfinished” poem “Kubla Khan,” Garber raises questions as to what it means for a work of art to be cut short. In a final essay, the author offers a stirring defense of the humanities as the division of the university that deliberately doesn’t solve problems; it wrestles with interpretations, not final answers.

The same goes for this intellectually generous and rewarding book. Like its many subjects, it repays the close attention it commands. —KIRKUS REVIEWS

February 29, 2012 LOADED WORDS By Marjorie Garber 304 pages 9780823242054, paperback, $26.00 Pub date: June 1, 2012 A vigorous, revealing collection about the pleasures and revelations of close reading, whether it involves words, books, biographies or ideas. Renowned scholar … Full Story →

Where Is Publishing Going?

Posted on February 23rd, 2012
by FUPress

From panel discussion called “Getting Published Today” at Bard College

By Helen Tartar, February 10, 2012

Photo by Bruce Gilbert

To give you my practical advice on getting published, I can direct you to a piece entitled “Writing a Book Proposal and Choosing a Publisher”. Or Google “helen tartar editor,” go into the Fordham ImPressions archive, and click on “Read More.” Therefore, my remarks here will be more general. When I asked Julia Rosenbaum for advice, she suggested that I talk about “Where is publishing going?” And so I will, though, as I told her, the answer to that can be quickly said.

I do not know, and I cannot know for sure, where publishing is going. To which I would add: if you meet someone who says she does know, don’t trust her—she is probably either trying to sell you something or under the sway of someone who’s trying to sell her something.

In a very mundane and specific way, I do something every day to contribute to where publishing is going. As an acquiring editor at a small university press, I orchestrate decisions about what gets published at the publishing house where I am employed, and I do what I can to help influence how those books are offered to the public. Because those decisions are sometimes tough and painful, it’s very important for me to remember that I do not know where publishing is going—that in fact I have to learn this from the people who come to me seeking to get published. Because the future of publishing lies in the books that people write.

One can, of course, know only two things about the future: first, that one cannot know with certainty what it will be; and second, that one cannot help wanting to do so. In China, writing was born entwined with the hope of divining the future, through the cracks in turtle shells. At our late date, we tend to think of writing as the source of history— despite Plato’s early warning that it is memory’s foe. But maybe part of the disquiet behind the question “Where is publishing going?” reflects some unsettled temporality latent in writing itself. READ MORE

From panel discussion called “Getting Published Today” at Bard College By Helen Tartar, February 10, 2012 To give you my practical advice on getting published, I can direct you to a piece entitled “Writing a Book Proposal and Choosing a … Full Story →