Guest Editors' Introduction

Crossing the Boundaries of Reception

In advance of the 2017 International Holocaust Remembrance Day and within days of President Donald Trump's inauguration, software developers Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz introduced a new name-reading Twitter account to the world: the St. Louis Manifest. The initiative recovered digital photographs from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and tweeted them along with brief biographical details about the people in the photos. One showed a picture of four young children in the woods, with one child highlighted. The caption read, "My name is Lutz Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz."

The tweets, of course, invoked a set of current crises, when calls to open borders to refugees from Burma, Syria, and other besieged countries—refugees who desperately sought self-preservation—met with triumphant and swift government edicts to close them. In addition to highlighting border closures, the Twitter project marked another moment when consensual and established conceptual borders of Holocaust memory had already begun collapsing. Social media had blurred the divide between historical artifact and narrative, with black-and-white family photographs of the past reaching out into the screens of the present. One could not avoid the uncomfortable historical spectacle of American isolationism once again turning refugees away at the border, this time in color and involving mostly women and children of color. Little more than seventy years after the liberation of concentration camps in Europe, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Simon-Skjodt Center noted mass atrocities committed against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma, including rape, torture, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, social media called attention to the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing a conflict already costing 400,000 lives and displacing millions from their homes. Images shared across the Internet similarly highlighted the plight of Libyan migrants over and at borders in Italy, where they risked perilous journeys at sea to reach European shores.

Border closures. Border crossings. Border violations. Border collapses. 2017 might well be described as the year of borders. Geographic boundaries are just one form that borders take. Events of 2017 also highlighted the boundaries of our ideas, our symbols, and our perspectives of the world. "Tribalism" has emerged as the new buzzword of 2017, one designed to capture the ways Americans are not only politically divided but bound by party loyalties and impermeable in our "tribes." In a political landscape dominated by accusations of "Fake News," ideas cannot get through. Or, if they do manage to get through, they take barely-recognizable forms. As the so-called "alt-right" has co-opted symbols of Europe's medieval past, a debate within Medieval Studies has emerged. This debate came to a head this summer when white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, used shields bearing symbols of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and the Knights Templars, providing new urgency to the question of what medieval scholars could and ought to do to save medievalism from the "alt-right's" distorted interpretations and perverse appropriations.

These many permutations of borders—and some of the crises they have provoked—were on our minds as we worked to develop this special issue of Reception. While our examples above are mostly about (geo)political issues, the concept of boundaries and borders seems to us increasingly important to the ways scholars approach literary and media studies, or at least ought to be. Technology has enabled the ease of transnational and intercultural movement of texts as never before. Audiences are global and networked as never before. Now is the right time to focus attention on the concept of borders and boundaries within literary and media studies, especially as the concept relates to reception study, where the foundation of our work is a concern with how language and meaning cross boundaries between those producing texts and those receiving them and how the texts and boundaries are transformed by the crossing. As we imagined the theme of this special issue, a consideration of "boundaries" within a reception-study context could include everything from the adaptation of texts from one medium...