A worked discussed in my essay, Dmitri Prigov’s Videnie Kasparu Davidu Fridrikhu russkogo Tibeta (Caspar David Friedrich’s Vision of Russia’s Tibet). Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dmitri Prigov and Costanza Baldini.
I first attended the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association a decade ago. It was a small affair gathering together a few hundred people on the somewhat desolate outskirts of Ann Arbor. In stark contrast, the ACLA’s latest annual meeting, held last month in downtown Manhattan, attracted over 3,000 delegates. In Ann Arbor, I remember hearing Haun Saussy launch a draft of the ACLA’s last once-a-decade Report on the State of the Discipline. Thanks partly to the intellectual excitement surrounding that event, I caught the ACLA bug and have attended most of the association’s annual conferences over the past ten years. I was not, however, able to travel to New York for the latest meeting and launch of the 2014–2015 report. I am therefore especially grateful to Jessica Berman and César Domínguez for giving me a virtual presence through an invitation to contribute to a still growing draft of the report, which is now online. My essay, “Archive of the Now,” takes its title from the wonderful multimedia website for innovative poetry run by Andrea Brady at Queen Mary, University of London. It begins with the curious story of how Brady’s website became collateral damage in a hacktivist action intended to target Internet research at Queen Mary funded by the UK Ministry of Defense.
