ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

Alright, so I'm currently fighting through some major wisdom tooth pain in order to get this together. Any problems you see should be 100% blamed on those worthless protrusions we call "wisdom" teeth.

 

The Little Review: Love, Art, Good

The Little Review is pretty clear about its purpose from the cover. "A Magazine of the Arts: Making No Compromise With the Public Taste." While it puts itself forth as an art magazine, and it does so forcefully, that does not mean that they have a complete understanding of what art is. I got a general feeling that The Little Review spent its ~84 pages trying to figure out what "good" Art is, and seemed to rely on the presence/communication of "love" as a concept to be an element of effective art. To be a bit more nuanced, I would say that they feel art should convey emotion, and love is a rather obvious emotion to try and convey, so that would explain its abundant presence in the text.

 

The Egoist: Idea, Experience, Modern

I'm with Caleb in his reaction to The Egoist's advertisment in The Little Review. I can't say I was awfully surprised to see that from a magazine for which Eliot served as assistant editor, but I would expect something like The Egoist and it's opening section entitled "Our Philosophy of the 'Real'" from Pound, if we're being totally honest.

Friendly jabs at Eliot and Pound aside, this magazine is trying desperately to figure out the formation of ideas, and how to do form appropriately modern ideas. A focus around experience is seen, and I suppose it makes sense. But I would like to track the use of "idea" and "experience" throughout the MJP's copies of The Egoist, and see just how hard they cling to these words.

 

The Crisis: Race, Training, Study

In an obvious point to anyone that is familiar with The Crisis, race plays a huge part of the magazine. This issue, though, conflates World War I, the lifting up of black people through training programs and their service in the military. This is a marked contrast to The Crisis issue that was released just before/after American joined World War I, and it's largely due to the intense patriotism/propaganda movement that gripped America as the horrors of World War I took hold.

This is seen first and foremost in the words I listed. While there is a focus on race, and the war at large, the magazine also has many advertisements for "training" schools that are open to either men or women. They also urge readers to "study" prominent issues such as new laws or other points of concern. World War I saw with it a larger allowance in what black people were allowed to take part in as members of society -- mostly out of necessity -- and The Crisis is aiming to capitalize on that newfound freedom by cheerleading their readers into not only a pride over their abilities, but a hunger to do more.

The Crisis : Soldier, Colored, advancement

Considering the fact that the magazine was edited by W. B. Dubois, this magazine seems to show value of black people in USA of 1918. The articles suggested in the magazine keep emphasizing the value of black soldiers, and their ability to deal with the problems in their own tasks. For example, in a letter from General Ballou, the speaker says, “there is no longer any occasion to resent race discrimination, because there was none.”(62) The writer even says that colored office could do their work properly. Such idea of foreigners inside the army who perform well their tasks can be also found in the exemplary dialogue between Socrates and Eudices. By explaining that the foreign soldiers also should be well treated, the story seems to emphasize embracing racial others in the society. A sonnet to negro soldiers also depict the value of black people who can do their task well by saying “…shall rise and fro their blows cast down the thoron of prejudice”(64) As such, this magazine keeps suggesting examples that depict the exemplary successful figures in the black society, and try to uphold the value of black people.

 

The Egoist : Symbol, music, science

This magazine shows the main idea on aesthetics of Modernism and its relationship with philosophical idea or cultural stuffs like music. The first article written by D. Marsden, ‘Our Philosophy of the Real’ shows agents of human development as manual labor and symbol making. By positioning each of agents as intension of actual thing and extension of mental process, the writer says that these forces would allow people to recreate their lives. He mainly deals with symbol which depicts sensuality made from the mind. What he tries to suggest is that while traditional idealism believed that symbolic language would correspond to the reality, nowadays, it is not possible, and the symbol is used by one’s own imagination and process of the mind which cannot directly refer to reality. The article ‘Claude Debussy’ makes connection between poetry and music, and this also makes us think about the relationship between sensuality and literary language. T.S Eliot’s article, Contemporanea also suggests certain traits of modernist thought. While emphasizing the influence of French poetry, he also says that “A poet, like a scientist, is contributing toward the organic development of culture”(84). This reminds us the line from his work, ‘the tradition and the individual talent’ which says that poet should operate like catalyst, by making connection with existing traditions without transformation of original meaning of the texts.

 

The Little Review : Abstraction, tradition, imagery

This magazine also implies techniques of modernism. Poems of Wallace Stevens show how the modernist poem is working. Abstraction is the most salient characteristic in modernism and we can read such traits in his poem ‘anecdote of men by the thousand.’ In this poem, the writer makes connection between soul and the external world, so makes us imagine abstract image of thinking that existence of people can become a territorial place. William Carlos Williams’ prose about love explains about his complex thought on love. He does not uphold the passion in love, and recommends us to be careful to the relationship with one another by alluding many traditional litearry texts in European culture. Both the content which tries to negate one’s free emotion and the form which alludes many literary works seem to show us a characteristic of modernism. A poem, ‘Dreams in war time’ depicts vivid images of the town, so this also reminds us technique of modernism.

How 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  * Soldier 

 

The 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. 

Link

https://www.smartevals.com/login.aspx?s=utulsa

I mostly applied the program to readings of The Smart Set. I plugged any words to do with gender, from obvious ones like "men v. women" to less obvious terms like maid or butler.

It was interesting to see how engendered terms actually seemed to increase with each subsequent issue. While I couldn't see any clear pattern to whether one gender was preferred over the other, I thought was most interesting was thinking about why gendered terms became more prevalent in later issues. My assumption would be that The Smart Set, the self proclaimed magazine of cleverness, often flourished when their pieces were biting satire of social norms. As the style of the journal became more developed and focused, it was cool to see the writers taking a more vested interest in dissecting gender roles in early American culture.

What attracted me to The Smart Set specifically was it's self-proclaimed wit, the cover always subheadlined with "A Magazine of Cleverness" This kind of self-aware almost-pretentiousness, I think, is an interesting tone that most might consider to be more representative of contemporary writing. I wanted to see what kind of snobbish, high-culture wit was like back in the early 1900's.

The specific issue I picked was the 4th issue of the 50th volume, dated December of 1916. I picked this one because I wanted to get a feel for the magazine later in it's run, assumably when it's readership and subsequently the writers who submitted material would have developed a pretty consistent idea of what the journal was like stylistically.

In communications, information is seen as a resistance to the natural entropy of the world. Patterns and facts are ways that we impose order on an otherwise chaotic and shifting reality. An archive then, is a physical manifestation of this concept. Through the categorization and storage of information, we build a structure from which we can base some sort of continuous identity. But how does the accessibility of a given archive influence it's effectiveness. 

On the surface, the assumption is that the ease at which a given person can access necessary information is directly proportional to it's utility. While I'd agree, the Stolen Time Archive is special in that it is purposefully counter-intuitive and obtuse, but to what end? One might argue that the creation of archives themselves is inherently 'stealing time'. By imposing order on our naturally chaotic world, we're essentially 'stealing time' by creating long-lasting time-biased media. The whole concept of an archive is to defeat the inevitable erosion that time enacts on everything. This archive then, sort of steals time back from us. A reminder that the world isn't necessarily easily categorized and no matter how much we try to impose our version of reality, we should always be wary of connections that aren't readily apparent.

What intrigued me about the story was the descriptions of the author's home street. It's particularly interesting to me how a geographical location, like a street, can seem so foreign to me but be the center of routine for someone else. I wanted to focus on how the it looks today, and what has survived since then. So I plotted out the areas surrounding the street, attaching pictures and descriptions of what those places are like now.

I was mostly surprised to find that the school mentioned, established in the early 1800's, is still operating today. So even though the city itself has changed, the people have changed, Joyce's description of a street that is quiet for most of the day except for when school gets out, is still applicable today. Things like infrastructure, buildings, etc, these are all things we assume to be the most robust over long periods of time. So it's interesting that even though the buildings and the street itself might look different, that moment, the concept of excitied children rushing out as school ends, is the most timeless aspect of North Richmond Street.

 

I began by looking at this old map of Dublin, and I found Richmond Street on it. I found myself intrigued by the space makring out "Croke Park". I noticed that Croke Park does not exist in the present day. Indeed, it seems to overlap with a way in which the street has been extended. I intend to check up on what is going on here, and what happened to the park, and whether the Araby area is in fact smaller than today we suppose, based on the possiibility of a shorter street.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zP3fg78jTS4s.k845hG2mnrcM

Attached is my basic map

Attached is my Araby map. I mapped the basic locations discussed in the story. I spent most of my time using the street view and familiarizing myself with the streets of Dublin.I really struggled to find a solid theme that I felt inspired to map for the story. It must just be the struggle of the end of the semester, but I was having a lot of trouble feeling inspired by the story. 

So instead I decided to do some research on literary maps in general. I found some incredible visual examples of famous literary maps in London and other famous literary locations. Rather than just a map of the places in the stories, some of these presented a visual representation of different characters that I found to be a lot more aesthetically pleasing. It was so cool to see all of the different types of literary representation there is out there, apart from what we have learned in this class. Attached is my favorite map that I found. It depicts various literary characters in London. 

I apologoize for this being a little off topic. Also I could only get the links of these to post for whatever reason. 

http://ebookfriendly.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Literary-London-map.jpg

It is a very good thing that I am not trying to go to the market or else this story would have a different ending, probably of me getting lost somewhere in Dublin and never being heard from again. Good for the kid for finding his way through Dublin. 

Looking for the word Space in our magazines, led me to a few revelations. At first, I haphazardly started looking through all of them, but after it crashed my chrome window I changed my mind. Before chrome went down though, I did get to see that space was essentially irrelevant to most of these magazines. In fact, the only interesting numbers or graphs were spawned from the Egoist and the poetry selections. Even then, it wasn't what I was looking for. I was hoping for some shreds of sci-fi, maybe some speculation about spaceflight. Alas, this tool--and others like it, seem to be best for confirming or denying the existence of what you are looking for in a text.  While I was looking for spaceflight, I found more about philosophical interpretations of space and time- as in the egoist. Whereas with most of the others there was little coherent use of the word space. The context aspect of voyant made this all too easy to determine. I feel like DH tools would allow one to look for elements or themes in a work without actually having to read about it. All you'd have to know is what keywords to use. 

 

write some stuff