Three Words, Three Magazines
Submitted by Caleb Freeman on Mon, 02/04/2019 - 18:45How is it possible to be so tired on a Monday? Good lord. Anyways, below I’ve compiled a table of 3 words per each of the 3 magazines that we read. I chose the words based on the frequency with which they occur in their respective texts (the minimum amount of times that they could recur was 10).
The Crisis: * War * Colored * SoldierThe Egoist: * Power * New * Modern
The Little Review: * Art * Life * Body
The Crisis is undoubtedly the most immediately political magazine of the bunch (and incidentally the magazine that I found most intriguing). It also seemed to be the most community-based publication out of the three that we viewed - contrast the "Complain" section in The Crisis (p. 61) with the one in The Little Review (p. 64). Moreover, I was surprised to find that, while WWI is front and center in The Crisis, it's largely absent from the other two magazines.
The Egoist, a journal "of interest to virile readers only” according to its advertisement in The Little Review (eye roll), was definitely not as accessible, with Dora Marsden's long philosophical treatise and Arthur Symons' long, flowery tribute to Debussy. Meanwhile, with The Little Review, which was less critically focused than this issue of The Egoist, it was a little harder to pin down some words that I felt spoke to an overall cohesion to the text. I might, however, be alone in this. I felt like the poetry ("Haunts" was a personal favorite) and the prose were a bit more immediate and corporeal than the largely abstract writing in The Egoist, hence the words I picked. Also, the Glossary is delightful.
I'll be interested to hear what everyone else thought about these magazines and their relationships with each other. Overall, it was incredibly interesting to read three magazines that were so different despite being produced at the same time.