As a major world event of the twentieth century, the First World War massively impacted the direction of the entire century that followed; social, political, and geographic landscapes changed throughout Europe, which in turn promoted a shift in art, music, and literature. This change occurred both in and out of Europe, as we have seen throughout this semester, especially given our focus on England, France, and the United States. Each country has a different story to tell of the war, and each presents it in a unique fashion through its literary productions, particularly in little magazines. I plan to analyze the cultural effects of The Great War through its portrayal in American, English, and/or French little magazines from the early twentieth century. I wish to use Gephi to discover what changed in the discourse of little magazines before, during, and after WWI.  Specifically, I intend to analyze the connections between the magazines, their authors, and what they discussed by running this information through Gephi, and interpreting the outcome.

I intend to use the MJP, as well the magazines on reserve at the library. Additionally, I have found a number of articles of interest to help form my argument; one of these is Mark Morrison's “Performing the Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse, Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London” from Modernism/Modernity magazine. His extensive discussion of speech's importance in poetry (focusing particularly on performance) ties in well with Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, both of which paint a vivid picture of prewar and wartime London and Paris.  I also found The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900-1930, a book by Michael Cotsell regarding the nature of trauma; Part 2 is of particular interest to me, containing sections “From the Theater of Therapeutics to Dramatic Modernism,” “The Theater of Therapeutics,” and “Trauma, Dissociation and Modernist Dramatic Form.” 

As for the magazines, I will be looking at long-running magazines such as The Little Review, The Crisis, The New Age, Wheels, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and Le Mercure de France, all of which were publishing between 1910-1922 (four years before to four years after WWI), with some variances.  The focus of my search will be anything related to international discourse, particularly pertaining to Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From there, a spreadsheet will be compiled: like the first Gephi exercise we did in class, it will contain the title of the work, its date, its author, the type of work, its genre, and the magazine it comes from. Its outcome will determine the direction of the rest of my paper, and allow me to develop a more concrete concept of how The Great War changed the world.