In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Magazine Modernism:Notes from the NEH Seminar
  • Lori Cole

"What is periodical studies?" was the central question driving our month-long NEH seminar, "Modernist Magazines," organized by Sean Latham, at the University of Tulsa. Fifteen scholars from English, comparative literature, and art history departments brought their expertise to critical discussions, pedagogy labs, technology lessons, and collaborative research. Because the majority of the participants shared on-campus housing near the seminar venue, the month also prompted a series of potlucks, trivia nights at a local bar, and at least one run through the campus sprinklers to combat the Oklahoma heat.

To conceptualize the burgeoning discipline "periodical studies," we first had to determine what constitutes a periodical—as a form of reading and publishing, as a collaborative business enterprise, and in relation to a codex book. The questions animating our debates were: What is the temporality of a magazine? What are its bibliographic codes? How do you model the multiplicity of voices that compose a magazine? Characterized by ephemerality and periodicity, circulated nationally or transnationally, the magazine is an enabling space for artists and writers in a variety of media with a wide range of aesthetic and political agendas. Magazines necessitate cultural and linguistic translation, and new thinking about what constitutes a periodical network or "imagined community." [End Page 116]

Our earliest seminars, co-led by Robert Scholes and Sean Latham, focused on the central disciplinary question of what constitutes the field of periodical studies, which Scholes historicizes as emerging from the original magazine theorist, Ezra Pound. Organizing our discussions around Scholes and Cliff Wulfman's Modernism in the Magazines, Latham and Scholes's PMLA article "The Rise of Periodical Studies," and the work of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, we talked about the difficulties of determining magazines' reception, and the complex economics affecting both writers' and advertisers' choices to participate in magazines.

We productively blurred the distinction between "little magazines" and popular magazines—for our purposes, embodied by The Little Review and Scribner's. Was there a sense of self-conscious marginality or resistance that these smaller magazines upheld? What are each type of magazine's pedagogical and cultural aspirations, and how are these determined by a perceived public? The scholarship of Cary Nelson, Ann Ardis, and Mark Morrisson offered models for how to approach the politics of magazine production and how magazines work to create certain kinds of audiences. After grappling with high-low distinctions, periodicity, changing technologies, and global networks that affect periodicals, we concluded that periodical studies productively complicates our conception of modernism more generally.

Part of our shared task was to determine how to study and teach these hybrid visual, literary, and historical objects—and what the future of these studies would look like, thanks to the advancement of digital technologies and digitization efforts such as the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), run jointly out of Brown and Tulsa. Because of the large-scale production and distribution of these publications, it is nearly impossible to master even a run of a single magazine. We brainstormed ways to let the magazines themselves generate assignments—for example, by teaching a modernism survey from the magazines rather than from an anthology. James Murphy offered his experience of reading the serialized version of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" and then comparing it to the novel, while Jeff Drouin shared blogs and timelines that his students generated from the magazines available on the MJP. Together we read Faulkner's "Dry September" in Scribner's and then in a short story collection to determine how the magazine context of the earlier version of the story affected its reception and revision. These teaching tactics, among others, were compiled by Mark Gaipa for the MJP website. [End Page 117]

With Mark Gaipa and other staff from the MJP on hand, we saw the way magazines are scanned and coded and brainstormed ways to expand and utilize this growing scholarly resource. Cliff Wulfman, the MJP's technical director walked us through XML, and the gracious graduate student assistants working on the Modernist Journals Project illustrated how to code the scanned publications for searchable fields. We were also introduced to Zotero, a bibliographic database, and discussed the...

pdf