It’s late in the semester and I’m weary–little rest beckons. My last fiction workshop is tonight, three hours at my house, over pizza. But between Christmas and New Year’s I go to Philadelphia to do 16 hours of interviews of job candidates at the MLA Convention. Not my idea of a good time. More on that another time.
Nevertheless, I’m beginning to ramp up my preparations for the new class I’m offering for the spring semester, and which will actually begin in mid January, The Little Magazine in America. It’s a fascinating topic–and one about which I know far less than I should. My idea is that in this seminar of about 12 students we will begin by looking at some of the 19th-century literary magazines that began so rich a tradition. From the start, they were iconoclastic, rebellious, determinedly weird. They were offering a very real alternative, hundreds of alternatives in fact, to commercial and popular literature.
Mark Twain was already mocking sentimental culture in Huck Finn–just think of Emmeline Grangerford. But the modern movement in the 20th century is defined in large part by its insistence on a fundamental divide between the popular and art that really matters. That’s what Eliot, Pound, and others were on about in making their work such a challenge to read. Meaning had to be mined by those who had the tools, the intelligence, the sheer stubbornness to stay with it. And that’s why so many modern artists, including Lawrence, Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and so on, were published originally in little magazines.
Not surprisingly, The Kenyon Review will be a focus of the class. I’m especially hopeful that the students will make considerable use of the KR archives, a real treasure trove of publishing history from 1939 on.
In a future entry I’ll talk more about the role of the little magazine today, how it’s changed and how, perhaps, it hasn’t.
I’m especially eager to hear from any readers who might suggest texts or other resources that may be of use in this new, exciting, rather daunting course!