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  • Counter-Intuitive Innovation
  • Marsha Bryant (bio)

Is our drive to “make it new” in the classroom connected to changing views of modernism itself?

Recent articles and papers on modern literature often assess modernism’s relationship to a broad social terrain that includes advertising, cinema, fashion, magazines, music, photography, and radio. Such work draws from the field of cultural studies which, as Patrick Brantlinger has argued, “locates the sources of meaning not in individual reason or subjectivity, but in social relations, communication, cultural politics.” Cultural approaches to modernism expand the materials for literary study while shifting emphasis away from the traditional focus on originality. This counter-intuitive means of “making it new” can enliven our lectures; for example, I have linked Prufrock’s social anxiety to Roland Marchand’s “Parable of the First Impression” in American advertising. Although poetry is a relative latecomer to cultural studies, Rei Terada observes that we now “talk about how lyric is, as it were, made of the same substance as other media and continuous with the fiber of a society.”1

In my recent teaching of American, British, and women’s poetry, I tap into these new configurations to renew the undergraduate research paper. My form of “periodical pedagogy,” to borrow Suzanne Churchill’s phrase, places poetry in dialogue with contemporaneous popular magazines. Their interplay of feature stories, readers’ letters, current events, literature, reviews, illustrations, advice columns, and advertising distills the wide field of cultural studies into a practical scope for writing ten-page papers. One assignment requires students to read women’s poetry alongside Ladies’ Home Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Ebony, or New Yorker. Selecting a single issue of the magazine they find [End Page 482] relevant to the poetry that interests them, students focus their arguments in two ways. First, they find a theme or motif that the poetry and magazine share, such as domesticity, gender roles, race relations, romance, beauty, or the literati. Second, students must decide whether the poetry mostly coincides or conflicts with the magazine’s ideology. A variation of this assignment asks students to assess a magazine that includes the poet’s work—such as issues of Vanity Fair with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry and prose, or the issues of Atlantic, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and New Yorker containing poems by Sylvia Plath. Besides eliciting close reading of a single poem, this latter option prompts students to consider the ways poetry circulates through diverse literary markets, sometimes blurring conventional distinctions between “high” and “low.” Such modes of inquiry reflect the cultural turn in new modernist studies.

Using popular magazines for these writing assignments also invites students to question the widespread assumption that poetry always resists the mainstream and the marketplace. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has noted that “Poetry, most particularly the lyric, has generally been construed (in its university and critical reception) as opposite to society and its discourses.”2 Criticism of women’s poetry in particular tends to position it as a counter-discourse to popular culture. By contrast, cultural approaches to poetry privilege convergences rather than hierarchies and boundaries. My magazine assignments allow students to take either side of these critical debates, which I invoke in our class discussion of the completed papers.

By synthesizing diverse material from popular magazines in conjunction with poetry, my students often generate livelier and more creative arguments than they achieve in traditional assignments. Their most sophisticated papers take nuanced positions about the poetry’s relationship to the magazine, moving beyond simple pronouncements of conformity or rebellion. For example, one student wrote an excellent paper on how both Millay and Vogue present a compromised flapper figure. Several essays have shown how Brooks shares Ebony’s vision of strong Black womanhood while departing from its postwar standard of beauty. (Brooks appeared in the magazine several times between 1945 and 1960.) Students have compared Plath’s portrayals of fraught motherhood with conflicting images in Ladies’ Home Journal and Millay’s portrayal of liberated womanhood with Vanity Fair’s commentary on women gaining the franchise. One of the more creative papers I have received discussed women’s writing and domestic space in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, generating its analysis from a 1914...

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