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Modernist Manifestos and Magazines, a third-year special option module, has been running at Keele for four years now. It originated as a research-led module—I designed it just as my monograph Literary Impressionism was in its final stages of publication—and it bears the traces of my fascination at the time with impressionism, stream of consciousness, and aesthetic manifesto statements. It was also born of my delight in the Modernist Journals Project as a researcher and teacher. Here was an open access resource with comprehensive coverage of multiple key little magazines and substantial coverage of others. It holds The Egoist, The Little Review, The English Review, and BLAST. It also has shorter-lived modernist experiments such as The Blue Review and Rhythm. There are so many issues of The Crisis that it is difficult to choose a single issue to focus on. The resource, I thought, would allow me to showcase the work of lesser-known or subsequently marginalised writers such as May Sinclair, and it would give students the opportunity to conduct their own self-directed research—reading as widely or as broadly as they saw fit within the archive—as scholars in their own right. Undergraduate students rarely get to visit archives, or to experience the thrills and pains of Derridean ‘archive fever’. As the MAPP team recently pointed out in their excellent article for Modernism/Modernity’s Visualities blog, an online archive, like the MJP and like their own Modernist Archives Publishing Project, ‘circumnavigates the travel, expense, and donnish privilege’ of archival research and allows for more accessible (if digital) opportunities for ‘imbibing with hand and eye the aesthetic appeal of so many different kinds of historical artifacts’. At the centre of the module, then, is this archive, with its digital materiality. It was important to me to highlight the material and economic conditions of modernist publishing, coteries and networks: who gets to set up their own magazine and who do they publish? What of mentorship and cronyism? How do little magazines contribute to or reinforce the coherence of a particular modernist ‘movement’? I was also very interested in reading writers’ non-fiction alongside their fiction and encouraging students to think about the messy oeuvres of particular writers along historicist lines.Here is the description of the module I give my students at the beginning of the semester:At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘little magazine’ was at its height. Novelists, poets, artists, philosophers, critics and political activists were publishing their work and their ideas in small, independently-run magazines and journals. In some cases writers and artists were actually the editors of these magazines and journals.This module has an online archive, The Modernist Journals Project, as its core text (). MJP is an exciting and comprehensive open-access archive of modernism’s ‘little magazines’. Most of the magazines, journals and anthologies studied on this module are available in full on the MJP website and the others (Fire!! and the manifestos of Marinetti and Loy) are available on other free internet repositories. Each week will look specifically at one or two issues of the journal in question, but you are encouraged to read widely across the digital archive.The module is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Political Manifestos’, outlines some of the key social and political issues of the day, and serves as an introduction to the way politics were being discussed by writers and artists. The second section, ‘Aesthetic Manifestos’ highlights some of the artistic and cultural statements of intent being produced by modernist writers in the early twentieth century. There is necessarily some crossover: many of the aesthetic manifestos are also political, and the political manifestos are frequently preoccupied with art and aesthetics. Students will be asked to consider the role of the literary magazine as a vehicle for progressive social change.Every year I am struck by how little of the MJP my module outline, and the set reading, can actually cover. We could all design modules around this resource and they would all look very different. I have also added in resources from elsewhere. The famous journal of the Harlem Renaissance, Fire!! is only available on a modern zine project online, and manifesto statements such as Marinetti’s were collected and made available to the students separately (the KLE is Keele’s blackboard interface). The week by week schedule follows, including the reading list:Week One: Introductory Lecture: introducing students to the MJP website and to the wealth of material held there, as well as some reflections on modernism, modernist publishing, and material production.Political ManifestosWeek Two: ManifestosF. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909)Wyndham Lewis, BLAST (1914, 1915)Mina Loy, ‘The Feminist Manifesto’ (1914)(All three of these texts will be available on the KLE)Week Three: The Freewoman and Rebecca WestRebecca West’s first critical writing was for Dora Marsden’s feminist magazine The Freewoman (later to become The New Freewoman). Her reviews for the magazine and her letters to the editor, in which she discusses literature, feminism and class politics, will be read alongside her first published novel, The Return of the Soldier.Reading: Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West, ‘A Modern Crusader: Book Review of a Modern Crusader’ in The Freewoman, (vol. 2, no. 27) 23 May 1912, pp. 8-10, and Rebecca West ‘Correspondence: A Reply’, in The Freewoman, (vol. 2, no. 29) 6 June 1912, pp. 56-7.Week Four: Fire!! and the Harlem RenaissanceIn 1926 Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several other African-American artists and writers brought out the first (and only) edition of Fire!!, intended as a quarterly journal showcasing the work of ‘Younger Negro Artists’. We will be reading this avant-garde magazine alongside the more established African-American arts magazine Crisis.Reading: The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, (vol. 22, no. 2) June 1921, and Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (vol. 1, no. 1) 1 November 1926. Read as much as you can of both magazines, but pay particular attention to the poetry by Langston Hughes in both The Crisis and Fire!!, and Zora Neale Hurston’s short story ‘Sweat’ in Fire!!.Fire!! can be accessed here: < ManifestosWeek Five: The English ReviewThe English Review was founded and edited by Ford Madox Ford. Its first three issues (December 1908, January 1909, February 1909) are exemplary as representations of the turn of the century mood in literature and in politics. Contributors include Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Tolstoy (trans. by Constance Garnett), H.G. Wells, and writers that we now view as modern(ist): Joseph Conrad and W.B. Yeats. They also feature ‘leaders’ on contemporary issues: unemployment, suffragism and empire.Reading: We will be focussing on the ‘Modern Poetry’ section of The English Review (vol. 1, no. 3) February 1909, pp. 385-97, which features poetry by Gerhart Hauptmann, W. B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, J Marjoram, and John Galsworthy. As well as this, please read as much of this issue (and the previous two issues) as you can manage, to get an idea of the tone and content of the magazine.Week Six: Rhythm and Katherine MansfieldRhythm was founded and edited by John Middleton Murry and ran between 1911 and 1913. It featured art commentary as well as literary commentary and printed ‘studies’ by artists such as Pablo Picasso and André Derain. Katherine Mansfield was a regular contributor from 1912. In June 1912 Mansfield and Murry co-wrote a manifesto statement entitled ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’: ‘Freedom in the work of art is the expression of the essentials. It demands the immediate rejection of all that does not help to make the expression the adequate symbol of the idea’.Reading: Rhythm: Art, Music, Literature Monthly (vol. 2, no. 5) June 1912. Read as much of this issue of the magazine as you can but pay particular attention to John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, pp. 18-20. Read also three of Mansfield’s stories, ‘Sun and Moon’, ‘Bliss’, and ‘Miss Brill’, Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. by Angela Smith (Oxford World’s Classics).Week Seven: The Egoist (1918), May Sinclair and ‘stream of consciousness’May Sinclair’s review ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’ in The Egoist was the first application of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ to literature: ‘It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end’.Reading: Read as much of The Egoist, (vol. 5, no. 4) April 1918 as you can, but pay particular attention to May Sinclair ‘The Novels of Miss Dorothy Richardson’, pp. 57-9. Read also May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (London: Virago, 1980).Week Eight: Ulysses in The Little ReviewUlysses ran in instalments in Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review from March 1918 until its suppression (in the middle of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode) in 1920. We will think in this seminar about issues of textual authority (which Ulysses is the correct Ulysses?), Joyce’s narrative experimentation and its difference from Richardson and Sinclair’s experiments, and the politics of censorship.Reading: The first two instalments of Ulysses in The Little Review, (vol. 4, no. 11) March 1918, pp. 3-22; (vol. 4, no. 12) April 1918, pp. 32-45. Also read the critical essay by Clare Hutton, ‘The Development of Ulysses in Print, 1918-22’, Dublin James Joyce Journal (no. 6/7) 2013-4, pp. 109-31. This is available on the KLE.Week Nine: Literary ImpressionismWhat is literary impressionism? How is it different to realism, or to modernism? What role do literary magazines play in the formation (or promotion) or artistic schools and aesthetic manifestos?Reading: Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’, Poetry (August 1913), ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (August 1913), and ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama (June and December 1914) alongside an extract from Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924): a ‘record of the impression made by Conrad the Impressionist upon another writer, impressionist also’. All of these articles and the extract from the memoir will be available on the KLE.Week Ten: Some Imagist AnthologiesThe initial collection of imagist poets and the subsequent anthologies chart the beginning of Imagism under the stewardship of Ezra Pound, through to Amy Lowell’s reimagining of Imagist ‘values’. How was Imagism different to impressionism, or, again, modernism? How are the aesthetic statements that Pound and Flint make different or similar to Murry and Mansfield’s aesthetic intentions in ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’?Reading: Des Imagistes (1914), Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (1915), Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology (1916), Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology (1917). Read as many of the poems as you can (by H.D., Aldington, Flint, Joyce, Cournos, Pound, Lowell, Williams, Ford, Lawrence et al) and pay particular attention to the statements on Imagism in the prefaces.Week Eleven: The Egoist (1919) and T.S. EliotT.S. Eliot’s famous article, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, was first published in The Egoist in September and December 1919. We will read the article in its original context alongside The Waste Land and consider Eliot’s assertion that ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’ with relation to his own practice of intertextuality.Reading: T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent I’, The Egoist (vol. 6, no. 4) September 1919, pp. 54-5 and ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent II-III’, The Egoist (vol. 6, no. 5) December 1919, pp. 72-3. Read also Eliot’s The Waste Land, in any modern edition you can find.I made sure, in the handbook, to specify what each week’s seminar would focus on. Some students only ever read the reading that I’ve highlighted. Others read across the whole issue, or read several issues of a magazine. The student can then determine their own level of engagement with the archive.However, in order to ensure a high level of engagement from each student with at least one week’s content, the assessment for the module is a group presentation. Here is how I introduce that presentation (note: these have been online this year, so reassurances about technology are new additions to the guidance):Assessment One: Group Presentation (20%)In the first two weeks (weeks two and three) of the module, I will introduce the subject of that week with a short presentation about the history of the publications we are studying that week. These will be recorded and uploaded as a mini-lecture and you can watch it in your own time. In subsequent weeks, it’s over to you!You will be divided into small groups in week two, and assigned a topic, and in weeks four, five, six, seven and eight you will record a mini-lecture to introduce the seminars yourself, with a short presentation on the history of the magazine to be studied that week (Fire!! and The Crisis, The English Review, Rhythm, The Egoist and The Little Review). Don’t worry about the technology: I will be there and will make sure everything works. We will only press record when we are ready!In order to deliver a good presentation, you will research and present an overview of the magazine’s character, aims and purposes: the background of its editors, its contributors, it circulation and target audience. What is the tone of the magazine? Who is it aimed at? Why does it publish the kind of work it does?These presentations will be assessed in terms of their accuracy, detail of historical research, and insight into the significance of the political and material context of literary publication. You will be assessed on the clarity and concision of your communication, on the diversity of sources used in the research, and on your ability to engage and reflect critically on the usefulness of these sources. Each group member will receive an individual grade for their individual presentation.These presentations have been unequivocally successful, year on year. The students conduct their own (frequently impressively thorough) research into the magazine and its contents. They choose to divide up the topics according to their own interest and they, almost without exception, deliver engaging and thoughtful presentations. One of the key benefits of this assessment, too, is that students are learning from each other. Often, I am also learning new things! I supplement the group presentation with a short further assessment:Assessment Two: Individual Report on Presentation (10%)ROLLING DEADLINEEach student will also submit, no later than one week after their presentation, a brief outline of their individual contribution to the research for the presentation (750 words). This should include an account of the research process and evaluation of sources used. This is your opportunity to make clear what your individual contribution to the group presentation was. There are sample essays from last year on the KLE. Each of these sample essays achieved a first class mark, so it is worth taking a look at these to give you an idea of what an excellent ‘individual report’ looks like.This was envisaged as a kind of ‘buffer’ for those students who felt that something in the process of group work had disadvantaged them: either they had done more than their fair share of work, or something in the group dynamics had caused an issue for them individually. It has evolved since I implemented it, and now has become an opportunity for me to teach digital research skills: the ‘evaluation of sources’ was too often a reflection on the fact that the Wikipedia page on, say, W. E. B. Du Bois wasn’t a very good source but they couldn’t find another and so used it anyway. This year I took the cohort on a tour of the Internet Archive, Proquest, digitised Beinecke materials, MAPP, and other sites. The digital research literacy training, now structurally embedded in the module (in weeks one and eleven) leads to better outcomes in the third assessment, a more traditional Research Essay (70%).The Modernist Journals Project enables students to become, as far as they are willing to stretch themselves, researchers in their own right. It removes barriers to archival materials and to the kinds of historicist or contextual studies that usually we would only expect from postgraduates, or only enable postgraduates to attempt. It also lends itself very well to an evaluation of modernism’s networks, its material conditions, and its lines of influence. ................
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