The recent MSA conference in Columbus—full of fabulous presentations as it was—reminded me anew that the real energy of such events gathers and builds in the roundtables. Or in the bar, or over coffee, or wherever discussion spills over beyond its allotted 90 minutes. We’re trying to duplicate that energy here on Print Plus.
One of our main goals when we established the platform was to provide a mechanism for expanding and extending discussion beyond the bounds of a single issue of the journal—since no matter how heated the discussion within its pages, a print issue is a unit, complete.
The current special issue on Weak Theory gives us the occasion to try something new; as Paul Saint-Amour, its guest editor, anticipated in his introduction, it has already occasioned “lively, even heated debate.” We’ll be channeling some of that debate into a series of short responses to the issue; the first wave of these responses should be up before the end of the year.
In the meantime, watch out for the November print issue, with its compelling cover image from Les Vampires. The issue includes a special grouping of essays—“New Perspectives on Wyndham Lewis,” from which we’ll soon be running Erin Carlston’s surprising “‘Acting the Man’: Wyndham Lewis and the Future of Masculinity” here on Print Plus. Upcoming in the next weeks as well are clusters edited by Rebecca Walkowitz (“What Is the Scale of the Literary Object?”) and David James (“Modernist Affects and Contemporary Literature”); articles on modernist pranks, modernist travel, English ballet and Irish radio.
Each day’s news continues to provide new enormities, new triggers for rage and ferment; I invite you to decant them into columns for “In These Times.” Are you seething? Send me your ideas at drc@sc.edu.