The Serial Reading Project

Now, at the start of modern periodical studies, let us admit that we have only just begun to read magazines. Ridiculous on the face of it—haven't we been reading magazines for centuries? Perhaps some of us have been reading them a bit too frequently—this admission is meant to acknowledge the relative neglect of magazines in our "serious," professional reading. For all the emphasis literary scholars have placed on the heteroglossic, intertextual, and indeterminate nature of the literary text, they have paid little attention to the magazine, which embodies these characteristics in even its most ordinary instances. While postmodern novels and poems have been celebrated for the ways in which they put authorship, linearity, and closure into question, the most ordinary magazine accomplishes the same effects without any fanfare. And yet the form only occasionally appears in scholarship and shows up even less frequently in classrooms.

It is in part because magazines so often represent a break from the kind of rigorous, close reading we do in our classrooms and our research that the complexity of magazines has remained not so much hidden from view as hidden in view. But this neglect is not just a product of prejudice; it is a product of one the basic characteristics of magazines. The ephemerality of the magazine—its commitment to the present, its periodic publication of numbered and dated issues, even its relatively (in comparison to the book) low production values—both defines the form and seemingly damns it to obscurity in the academy. The problem with this association with disposability is that the magazine has been quite literally disposed of by libraries, making it hard to gain access to them today. Robert Darnton has celebrated the "extraordinary staying power" of the book, which, "ever since the invention of the codex sometime close to the birth of Christ, . . . has proven to be a marvelous machine."¹ Although the magazine is a good sixteen centuries younger than the codex, it too has proven quite durable. It is time to look at this machine's marvels as well.

The time has never been better to do so. With the inception of digital archives, many of the practical issues of preservation and access to magazines are gradually being solved. The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies is possible to a large degree because of such websites as the Modernist Journals Project.² This essay joins in that work. It proposes teaching a novel in the fashion that millions of readers first encountered novels, as serials. As more little and mass-market magazines are digitized, it will become easier to incorporate not just the reading of installments in our syllabi, but to have students read installments as they so often first appeared, in the pages of magazines. For example, I began teaching Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent in serial format using photocopies of the relevant pages from the magazine in which it appeared, ignoring the rest of the magazine. Now, however, I teach it from the invaluable ConradFirst website, which not only reproduces Conrad's serialized fiction but also scans the issues that ran the serials, so my students can see the complete material context of the novel's initial publication.³ We need to replicate this project for all the major authors of modernism and begin creating a bibliography of serialized novels that are already available. The aims of teaching The Secret Agent this way are to trace the development of the novel from magazine to book, to understand the impact serialization has on reading a novel, and to appreciate better the generic traits of the magazine, the novel, and the serial.

Reading magazines opens up a new field of opportunities for research and the teaching of undergraduates and graduates. As Sean Latham and Robert Scholes have argued, "Periodical studies [is an] emerging field, which has both focus and breadth and cuts across accepted fields and structures in a precise and reasoned manner that enables a range of activities, from undergraduate learning to advanced research."⁴ It is not enough, Latham and Scholes argue, to treat magazines only as repositories to be...