For the blog this week, I decided to throw together a quick map of some of the locations and references in the 1922 issue of The Dial. I marked the publication point of The Dial; locations where contributors published from (or where we can approximately assume they might have been contributing from based on a quick search through their wiki pages which, while not scholastically sound, I figured would suffice for this informal mapping); and locations referenced in the content of the 1922 issue. I’m sure I missed plenty of places, but this at least shows a general scope from a first pass through the issue.

I had been struck by the amount of locations that were brought into conversation in this issue and I thought it might be helpful for us to have a visual aid to see the scope of The Dial’s international reach. In many ways this collage of spaces mimics Eliot’s literary-historical patchwork that is The Waste Land; we also can see the traces of the mediums Eliot leveraged through references to Dada, modern art, music, and more in the editorial pieces towards the end of the issue highlighting the current state of culture.

I found The Dial’s use of The Waste Land more compelling than The Criterion because of the parallels in broad scope; while The Criterion played more with experimental form in its pieces which parallel The Waste Land’s experimental approach, I thought that The Dial situates the poem in a far more complex network that encourages a dialogue between reading Eliot’s poem and the rest of the issue (and in that sense, in dialogue with the broader socio-cultural climate of 1922).

Here is a google drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z6vDHLsFYlWuSMNYNfOT_Snn6Fk00T0y/view?u...