periodicals
In this article, I want to examine briefly some connections between transnational networks, translation, and multilingualism in modernist magazines.[1] To start, let’s consider the following instances of translated work found in a more or less random selection of modernist magazines: Richard Wright’s Black Boy in Les Temps modernes (1947); F. T.
Chinese North American author Edith Eaton, writing as “Sui Sin Far,” is one of the most transnational of periodical writers publishing at the turn of the twentieth century (fig. 1). She contributed over 220 texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and narrative voices, to over fifty Canadian, US, and Jamaican magazines and newspapers between the late 1880s and her death in 1914, although contemporary scholarship acknowledges only about fifty mostly Chinatown-themed stories published in her book Mrs. Spring Fragrance, under the pen name “Sui Sin Far” (fig. 2)
In Little Magazine, World Form, Eric Bulson issues this maxim: “When it comes to the little magazine, form is material, material is form, and the analysis of one necessarily involves factoring in the other.”[1] In this piece I explore the issue of raw material availability through a transnational framework. How might directing our attention to the paper and fuel shortages in the British Commonwealth in the 1940s enliven the debates over modernist aesthetics in little magazines?
In a blurb published on its website, the Cape Town-based literary activist collective Chimurenga describes the motivation behind issue fifteen of its eponymous journal, titled “The Curriculum is Everything”:
In his 1916 essay “Trans-national America,” Randolph Bourne rejects an anglophone, “Anglo-Saxon” vision of US society and culture. Like many of his contemporary writer-editors in multilingual New York, Bourne’s vision of a modern US literature was polyglot and polyvocal. And yet, with the essay rooted as it is in Bourne’s response to World War I, he continually restates the implications of borders alongside the uncomfortable reality of the strains of “orthodox nationalistic” sentiment vigorously displayed in the US after July 1914.
Le Moulin, an avant-garde magazine published in Taiwan in the 1930s, challenges the assumption that the transnational turn helps Western modernist periodical studies bring diverse and regional modernisms into conversation. Published by Taiwanese poets who had studied in Japan between the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese-language Le Moulin was an ephemeral modernist magazine emphasizing surrealist literature, hyperbolic imagery, and transnational modern life. It only had four issues and merely seventy-five copies per each issue were available between 1933 and 1934. The Moulin poets, through reading Japanese translations of the writing of the French Surrealists and studying Japanese Surrealist works, constructed a sense of synchronous effect in their poetic texts to reshape Taiwanese literature in the Japanese colonial period. In addition, they published their poems, short stories, and poetics in local and popular newspapers, advocating their aesthetic theory and innovative literary
Modernist studies’ broadening engagement with the transnational has led to greater attention to mobile forms such as the little magazine. Despite difficulties (as Kate Hartke reminds us in this cluster) such as paper shortages and problems with staffing, shipping, and supply, the periodical’s ability to travel between ports separated by oceans or within cafés divided by ideological walls enabled it to give rise to an array of modernist movements, driven by writers, editors, and readers committed to diverse aesthetic and political ends.
In 1925 Henry Poulaille issued a questionnaire asking, “Do we have an international culture?”[1] In response René Guénon questioned the premise of the exercise, writing, “I do not know if whether by ‘international culture’ you mean only European culture or . . .
We're all familiar with this scenario: a scholar spends years of her life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge on a relatively narrow topic, and the reward for this dogged pursuit is the esteem of colleagues and mentions in specialist publications. Then, an event occurs that overlaps with the scholar’s area of expertise. This scholar’s topic now dominates the news cycle. Many would view this as cause for celebration, a chance to share their research with a broader audience. Our hypothetical scholar might announce, over drinks with friends, “It’s my moment!
Lower-middle-class and working-class girls coming to the big city in the early twentieth century made all sorts of life choices, but in the popular fiction of the period a disproportionate number of them end up as chorus girls. Chorines turned into icons of American urban modernity—versatile, daring, sexy, and young. My article will approach this phenomenon by way of Owen Johnson’s chorus girl novel The Salamander, which appeared monthly in McClure’s Magazine from September 1913 to June 1914 before it came out as a book shortly thereafter.