Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities

I just want to say that yesterday's presentations did a good job of bringing out the conflicts and contradictions in your respective aspects of The New Age. There was some good analysis as well as the exposure of some potentially fruitful points of research. For Monday, we'll hear from the two groups that still need to present and will then discuss Ardis, Morrisson and Bornstein. This will wrap up our study of The New Age and bring us into the wider world of avant-garde magazines and cultures. Our reading for Thursday 7/17 will consist solely of what you bring to the table in your readings of the other magazines at the MJP.

You'll also notice that I've changed the Descriptive Bibliography assignment to remove the presentations and place a focus on what values your magazine ascribes to the literary. This will form the background of our discussion on Thursday. Much information might be found in the MJP’s introduction to the journal you’re studying, in the Essays section, and in the Biographies area. Those interested in further research can check out the Books and Periodicals Database. I've added more practical information to the assignment page, so please do read it over again.

Also, since some of you expressed interest in technology workshops, use the comments here to (1) make requests, (2) indicate your availability, and (3) say whether you primarily use a Mac or a PC. I'll find out what facilities we can use at Brooklyn and will set something up.

Have a great weekend!

I thought Marianne LaBatto's presentation on the Special Collections archive was fascinating, as it dovetailed nicely with some of the issues we discussed in class re: archives and the Modernist Journals Project. In particular, I was struck by the fact that the Special Collections archive functions as an organ of institutional memory for the College. The collection of print ephemera -- tickets, flyers, student literary magazines and newspapers, yearbooks, and faculty or alumni manuscripts and print drafts -- seemed to have value in that these items "pay tribute" to the history of Brooklyn College and its effect on local, regional, and even national culture. It was very telling in that regard when Marianne was asked by one of us (very astutely) why Alan Dershowitz chose to give his papers to Brooklyn College instead of Harvard: her answer, "he credits Brooklyn College for his career." So the archive seems to perform a role in furthering the institution's ideology.

As discussed in class, an archive is a site for the storage and production of knowledge, and its institutional politics will always somehow affect the knowledge produced from its holdings. Marianne's advice to do your secondary research before going to the archive for primary research was very sound indeed. However, I was struck by her statement that the archive staff does not do any interpretation for you. Their job, she says, is to collect, arrange, describe, preserve, and make available items that are precious or of "enduring value." I think that the actions of bibliographical / archival description, arrangement, and production of access mechanisms do involve some interpretation of the materials. In particular, their method of categorizing the Dershowitz papers down to the folder level involves an intimate knowledge of the material in order to schematize its organization and to produce the accompanying research guide. Also, what does it mean that a researcher will sometimes only be allowed to view a smaller selection of the items requested? As well, the fact that the archive can only keep a certain number of items of "enduring value" that requires a "certain amount of prophecy" in decision-making speaks to the amount of interpretation and institutional politics involved.

At any rate, I'm curious to know what were your thoughts on the presentation. Also, since most of our archival reading is digital, what was your experience in handling the physical artifacts? Do you have a sense of what is lost and gained in the digitization process?

During the coming week we'll focus on how to read the "coherent and mixed genres" of an avant-garde magazine, The New Age, hosted at the Modernist Journals Project (MJP). For Monday (7/7), you'll read two articles by Sean Latham and Robert Scholes that contextualize the need within modernist studies to archive and research the magazines in which so many of the canonical works initially appeared. The general introduction to The New Age, written by Scholes and the MJP staff, highlights the practices and beliefs of editor A.R. Orage, exposing some of the literary values that characterize early British modernism. As you perform your own reading of The New Age, pay particular attention to what values are expressed by the various contributors and the various genres that appear within its pages. Do they share much in common with each other, or with Orage? Or do you perhaps detect a lot of dissonance? How do they "speak" to one another?

Remember: this week is about enhancing our close reading techniques of "mutually constitutive discourses," so absolutely everything literary and non-literary is fair game for analysis, including advertisements, reader correspondence, book reviews, and page layout (as we discussed re: Wyndham Lewis and Blast on the first day of class). 

If you have time, please use the comments beneath this post to jot down some of your observations in the magazine or to make connections to any of the scholarly readings we've looked at so far. This will help us generate some good material for discussion on Monday.

Have a great holiday!

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