32219

SoSe 21: Literary Magazines

Florian Sedlmeier

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By convention, our diachronic literary histories are organized by authors’ names and oeuvres. As the burgeoning field of the history of the book shows, however, since the nineteenth century the focus on individual writers and their works, anchored in a range of critical practices, ought to be balanced by taking account of the function of literary magazines. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the number of magazines that publish literary texts grow exponentially. While this growth not only enables the professionalization of authorship in the first place, magazines also shape and create genres and they influence the practice of writing novels, as these are subject to serial modes of publication, and lead to debates about practices of reading. While most late-nineteenth-century observers view the flood of magazines in the context of pervasive anxieties of the market, others emphasize their participatory potential and embrace the shifting conditions of literary value these periodicals afford. In the twentieth century, artistic and literary avantgardes often rely on the so-called little magazines to consolidate themselves vis-à-vis existing literary institutions, including established periodicals. With the current shift to digitization, magazines have become extended platforms that negotiate literary value against the backdrop of a productive tension between print and digital culture. Pairing key accounts from book and magazine studies with several case studies, we will trace these developments. Our discussions will focus on the aesthetic, economic, and political ends of literary magazine culture as it structures the literary field and marketplace from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Most centrally, we will ask how literary magazines over the course of decades and centuries have shaped and challenged aesthetic dispositions. Not least we will read William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890; suitable editions are Penguin Classics and Modern Library). Set and published, both as a serial and as a book, at the heyday of magazine culture, the novel is partly organized around a fictive literary magazine and negotiates many of the questions that will structure our critical examinations. Students are expected to participate actively with regular contributions to class discussion. As a creative assignment, they are asked to collectively design and edit a little magazine of their own. For a graded “Schein,” they will have to write a term paper. close

Additional appointments

Fri, 2021-04-16 10:00 - 12:00