The Place of Belletristic Writing in Scholarly Publishing: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Keynote Addresses, MLA Convention 2003

If literary awards were books, you could enter a library and find shelves of them, from the folio volumes of the Pulitzer and Nobel, requiring two arms to lift and carry to a table, to slim chapbooks like the Hillsborough Historic Society Award for Poetry on Topics of Local North Carolina History, Preferably about Orange County, which my daughter won when twelve years old. Yet if you wanted to find an award for the journals themselves, where all the individual award-winning writers publish their stories, poems, memoirs, essays, and other forms of belles lettres, or an award for the editors of those journals, even after an advanced search in WorldCat, as far as I am aware, you would turn up nothing. Such a 'book' has needed to be written - needed badly, in my view and in the view of other members of CELJ, whose membership includes many literary journals. In response to this embarrassing lack in our culture, CELJ worked during 2003 to establish such an award, and, at the MLA Convention in San Diego, the CELJ Award for Literary Achievement was unveiled. The award is actually a series of three rotating awards for Best New Literary Journal, Distinguished Literary Editor, and the Parnassus Award for Significant Editorial Achievement for a single issue of a journal that demonstrates a peak achievement of publishing mission.¹

It was only fitting, then, that the keynote addresses on the occasion of this important announcement be given by two prominent members of the literary publishing field. Hilda Raz, editor of the distinguished literary journal Prairie Schooner, and Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, helped to celebrate the new award by speaking on the place of belletristic writing in scholarly publishing. Raz reflects on the long history of Prairie Schooner's role in nurturing writers, many of whom have gone on to become celebrated authors, and then outlines several ways in which such a publication contributes to the university institution of which it is a vital part. Lependorf puts forth the pointed argument that the literary journal, by providing a distinctly belletristic context for the critical essay, opens up scholarly work to a greater multiplicity of expression and meaning than is possible in a traditional scholarly publication. Freed from the constraints of the purely academic forum, criticism in the pages of literary journals, drawing equally on creative and scholarly purposes, can be radically opinionated, passionately reflective, critically experienced. Both Raz and Lependorf demonstrate that literary publishing in the academy is constitutive of the soul of the university.