Debated, revised, and amended ad infinitum, Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit,” proposed in his field-defining 1982 essay “What Is the History of Books?”, has become one of book history’s foundational paradigms. On the circuit’s 40th birthday, this special session surveys the circuit’s legacy—its impact on and relationship to the “advances in book history that occurred during the following quarter of a century” (Darnton 2007)—its cross-cultural portability, and its enduring relevance within a rapidly transforming media field. How has Darnton’s schema enabled and served the interdisciplinary fields and projects that fall under the loose rubric of “book history” and “print culture”? What generative tensions arise when we consider the circuit’s limits and potentials for print cultures increasingly removed from those of pre-copyright, Enlightenment-era France? In conversation with a long line of scholars whose work has centered, applied, and critiqued the circuit—including Thomas and Barker (1993), Albertine (1995), Murray (2004), Travis (2008), and Beins (2018)—this special session renegotiates the communications circuit through twentieth-century print materials that have traversed “alternative routes and circuitous channels” (Murray 2004)—channels markedly different from, albeit intelligible through, those posited by Darnton’s schema. Each presenter on this panel invokes the circuit as a jumping-off point for schematizing the field of literary production while allowing specific instances of subcultural twentieth-century publishing to revise and amend the circuit’s defining actors, pathways, and objects. Across the production, dissemination, and reception of Black pulp fiction, feminist periodicals, and Black feminist reprints, we see how circuit and text co-constitute one another and how, in turn, scholars’ deployment of the communications circuit across print-cultural contexts must remain supple enough to accommodate an unpredictable and evolving media environment. Each presentation will take approximately 18 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes free for unstructured discussion.

In “The Posterity Circuit and the Problem of Time,” Alec Pollak considers the consequences of the communication circuit’s exclusive focus on textual movement at the point of initial publication and circulation (rather than a text’s persistence and survival over time). Due to this limited temporal scope, the circuit’s infrastructure struggles to account for texts denied publication, censored, exhumed decades later, and so on—all obstacles to which the writings of second-class “intellectual property citizens” (Vats 2020) are subject. Pollak renegotiates the circuit’s infrastructure through Black feminist texts “rediscovered” and “recovered” during the 1970s and 1980s and posits the “posterity circuit” as an extension of Darnton’s schema to account for the multiple lifecycles of texts that encounter censorship and neglect upon initial publication.

In “Publishing Circuitry Refracted through Feminist Periodicals,” Agatha Beins reminds us that the communications circuit was primarily designed and deployed to trace the movement of a specific textual object—the book—and demonstrates how the circuit is exceeded, diverted, and reorganized by hybrid, liminal, and protean print-cultural forms like the social movement periodical. She examines feminist periodicals of the 1970s—their grassroots models of authorship, ad hoc modes of production, and particular social functionalities—to reveal how significantly Darnton’s schema relies on the reduction of diverse ontologies of “the text” into a singular ontology of “the book.” Beins invites feminist periodicals to reverse this reduction and, by examining the affective, embodied, and subcultural reading communities enabled by these periodicals, establishes the need to map textual movement with attention to the particular affordances of different print-cultural forms.

In “Spliced Circuits and Short Circuits,” Kinohi Nishikawa presents new research on Holloway House—the longtime, near-exclusive publisher of African American pulp fiction in the post-civil rights era—to unpack the hermeneutic affordances of textual objects that defy the communications circuits’ posited pathways and presumptions of uni-directional movement. How might scholars address events in the publishing-reception circuit when a direct line connecting nodes is multiplied or diverted? Nishikawa considers two such events in Holloway House’s publishing history—its failure to contain the influence of its main authors, thereby allowing other creators to supersede their production, and its continued publication of white men’s pin-up magazines alongside Black pulp fiction—to assess what happens when the communications circuit is spliced from two or more paths and what happens when the circuit shorts, or travels along an unintended path, in order to imagine what revised communications schema this multiplication and diversion might entail.