PAUSES IN PRODUCTION: READER ACTIVITIES IN MAGAZINE CULTURE, 1893–1922

A dissertation presented by

By

William Reed Quinn

to The Department of English

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the field of

English Literature

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts November 2019

1 PAUSES IN PRODUCTION: READER ACTIVITIES IN MAGAZINE CULTURE, 1893–1922

A dissertation presented by

By

William Reed Quinn

ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University December 2019

2 Abstract

The responses of historical readers and their engagement in print culture remains a mystery in literary study. By recovering readers’ letters to the editor in magazine culture, my dissertation recovers readers’ efforts to evaluate and critique art, and thereby participate in the formation of taste. I argue that the social and cultural consequences of twentieth century literature cannot be fully understood without also considering the imbricated relationships of authors, editors, and readers within serialized print culture. I develop a hybrid methodology that draws from distant and close reading practices to explain readers’ reactions to cultural production and to model the infectiousness of ideas within literature. This method makes a new intervention in literary debates about aesthetics and politics by ascertaining the ways readers evaluated style and, in doing so, energized literary taste with social, cultural, and political valences. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields, such as social and data sciences, I examine the roles of these letters from various magazines, such as the NAACP’s The Crisis, the avant-garde Little Review, the more broadly read Poetry, and the socialist magazine, The Masses. The interactions between readers, editors, and authors provide historical parallels to our contemporary moment in which ideologies circulate and compete online.

3 Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to my advisor Carla Kaplan for her encouraging support and patience.

Her advice and feedback gave me confidence in my research and writing. I am similarly grateful to my committee: Ryan Cordell, for making me feel like I already belonged and that my work was valuable and needed; Patrick Mullen, for challenging my claims and elevating my ideas; and, Julia Flanders, who frequently took my scattered, incoherent thoughts and helped me build them into an argument.

I also thank the Digital Scholarship Group and NULab at Northeastern University, especially Sarah Connell, Ashley Clark, and Syd Bauman. Their work and insight enriched my own research and shaped how I approach and understand the role of scholarship.

The graduate “students” at Northeastern have also greatly improved my thinking. I am indebted to many people and conversations, but especially Abbie Levesque and Alanna Prince for starting the American Literature and Cultures group. Sharing and workshopping our drafts there helped me focus my argument and better understand the current needs of literary studies. I am also grateful to Sarah Payne, who generously shared call-for-papers and showed me the ropes of navigating a PhD program.

As I look back, I realize that this project has been brewing for a long time and many people have guided me to this point. I am thankful to Sean Latham and Jeff Drouin at University of Tulsa for sparking my interest in magazines and digital humanities. I am also very grateful to

Susan Marren at the University of Arkansas, who first got me into modernist literature and then graciously guided me through the ensuing confusion.

4 For its crucial financial support that made this work possible, I would like to thank

Northeastern University’s College of Social Science and Humanities for awarding me a graduate stipend as well as a Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

I could not have done any of this without my family and friends. The love of my mom

(Tricia), dad (Bill), and sister (Catherine) is vital to everything I do. I am so wonderfully blessed to have them.

And finally, I’d like to thank my fiancé and partner, Cara. I could thank her for all her effort in helping me get here, such as the countless emails I asked her to read. But, what I’d really like to thank her for goes beyond work. Put simply, my life is better because of you.

5 Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgements...... 4 Table of Contents ...... 6 Introduction...... 8 Bibliography ...... 30 Methodology ...... 34 Seriality ...... 35 Close and Computational Readings ...... 38 Conclusion ...... 51 Bibliography ...... 52 Readerly Revisions: Letters to the Editor in The Crisis ...... 57 Introduction...... 57 The Crisis Calls for Readerly Contribution ...... 61 Deep Structures of Readerly Influence ...... 66 The Cost of Cultural Capital ...... 79 Conclusion ...... 84 Bibliography ...... 86 Combative Collaboration: Readers in the Cultural Field of The Little Review ...... 91 Introduction...... 91 Reader Responses to the Blank Issue ...... 95 Combative Collaboration and Dialogic Modernisms ...... 101 Editors Reactions to Reader Responses ...... 109 Conclusion ...... 118 Bibliography ...... 121 The Merits of Mediocrity: Harriet Monroe’s Great Audience and Poetic Composting ...... 127 Introduction...... 127 Communal Labor in Letters ...... 133 Vectors of Influence ...... 141 Weak Aggregations of Weeks’s Compost ...... 149

6 Conclusion ...... 156 Bibliography ...... 157 Surface Socialism: Incompatible Readers in The Masses ...... 163 Introduction...... 163 Readers’ Discontent with Merger ...... 166 Modeling Surfaces ...... 169 Artistic Evolutions ...... 175 Conclusion ...... 179 Bibliography ...... 179

7 Introduction

The belief that art could change or reinforce cultural values was commonplace in twentieth-century magazines. Readers, editors, and writers expressed excitement, concern, and anxiety what literature does to peoples’ thoughts and ways of thinking as it circulates through society. In a socialist magazine, The Masses, a disgruntled reader writes, “The Masses, it should be spelled Asses—Foul and filthy...you cannot find inspiration in a sewer nor can you touch filth, physically or mentally without being contaminated” (December 1915, 20). And, the book reviewer in the NAACP’s The Crisis urges readers—especially white readers—to pick up W. E.

B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: “Let them read here, read carefully, and they will be enlightened; also, I will venture to assert, be humiliated” (May 1920, 35). For better or worse, many magazine readers assumed literature was capable of spreading contagious ideas and reshaping society.

In focusing on the text itself, literary studies often overlook reader reception and, therefore, have to speculate about how texts reproduce ideologies within readers. When literary history reincorporates reader reception, the afterlives and social consequences of literature become visible again.

This dissertation investigates the infectious nature of literature by examining the points of contact between readers, writers, and editors. These contact points are most visible within serialized magazine culture, specifically in the form of readers’ letters to the editor. Published letters from readers were a common feature in magazines and appeared in diverse magazines, from the popular, humor magazine, Punch, to coterie literary magazines like The Little Review.

The content of letters contain praise, criticism, suggestions for future content and generally carry

8 on conversations with editors and sometimes authors and poets. As such, readers’ letters provide a record of cultural interpretation. Historical readers—as opposed to ideal, assumed, or model readers—add complexity to reader response theory. Many letters conformed to shared patterns.

As Janice A. Radway argues in Reading the Romance, “Similar readings are produced...because similarly located readers learn a similar set of reading strategies and interpretive codes that they bring to bear upon the texts they encounter” (8). But, within the same community, some readers challenged the dominant reading strategies. These dissenters unsettled literary consensus and provoke further responses.

The unique claim of this dissertation is that readers’ responses—far from being local or passive—often fold back into systems of literary production and prompt a response from cultural producers in return. Attending to these letters recuperates readerly reaction and feedback and, therefore, reveals dimensions of consequentiality in writing and reception. Readers’ letters shaped literary production. Readers occasionally swayed editorial decisions or engaged directly with authors and poets.

Readers’ letters act as a form of textual transduction. In microbiology, transduction refers to the introduction of foreign DNA through a virus (a “viral vector” or mediating agent) in order to articulate or suppress certain gene expressions in a host. Transduction typically follows a simple, repeatable pattern: a host transfers genetic material to a bacterial virus, which then carries that information and transfers it to another host. Textual transduction frequently occurs in magazines when readers write and writers read, enabling both groups to transfer their thoughts, preferences, and prejudices. Transduction prompts reactions. Following textual transduction

9 through serialized publication elucidates both the relationships formed by contact as well as the after-effects that each host contracts.

When a reader received her magazine in the mail, she may have hastily opened it and begun reading immediately. Turning the slick pages, she perhaps scans the glossy advertisements in the front matter before settling on a story somewhere near the middle of the magazine.

Already, one form of transduction is beginning. Genres mingle together within the magazine and they share and recombine each other’s meanings. The reader’s nonlinear route through the magazine brings diverse texts into contact with each other. In doing so, each text partly shapes the interpretive outcome. These textual transfers combine in unexpected ways and articulate or suppress interpretive possibilities. In The Adman in the Parlor, Ellen Gruber Garvey looks at reader reception of magazines and argues, “advertisers also depended on stories to create a climate in which their ads would persuade readers to become buyers” (4). The editor’s selection of fiction and other works could facilitate or inhibit the persuasiveness of advertisements. The magazine is an environment that facilitates transduction between genres. Furthermore, the magazine incubated infectious conditions that primed readers to think like consumers, and here a second instance of transduction occurs between magazine and reader. In large magazines, editors defended advertisements as up-to-date news forms about current trends, styles, and fashions

(Garvey, 169). In supposedly high-brow magazines that did not have large advertising sections, editors were also keen to keep their readers informed about style (perhaps in a different sense), ongoing issues, and other concerns. Literary criticism often assumes that reader reactions are passive or, at least, localized.

10 But, letters to the editor continue the sequence of textual transduction and form a new line the moves from consumers back to producers. Reception, here, is not an endpoint but a continuation. As the reader examines the magazine, she perhaps becomes annoyed at the collection of poems towards the back of the magazine, finding both the form and message to be irritating. Her resistance to these poems is one possibility in textual transduction. Her rejection does not end the sequence of transduction, however. Instead, she writes to the editors explaining her disapproval and urges them to be more selective by suppressing textual expressions of a similar strand. She provides suggestions that they might find helpful and, in doing so, encourages the articulation of other expressions. As her letter carries information, the conventional form of transduction in literary studies (from producer to consumer) is reversed.

The editors, convinced by her argument, publish her letter in the following issue— though, editors frequently published the letters of discontented readers. The magazine now absorbs the reader’s impressions. The textual material of her letter now enters the textual pool of the magazine, transferring her own interests and priorities to the assemblage of other genres.

Sitting beside each other in the magazine’s pages, these different genres make contact and share their genetic material. Her letter, now separated from her and connected to other texts, finds itself susceptible to their meanings as well. The other genres are also remediated by her letter. Each host (the readers, contributors, and editors) is susceptible to the other’s information transference.

When the reader picks up the next issue, she finds her letter somewhat mutated by the editorial selections and proximity to other materials.

Using textual transduction as a framework also elucidates how literary production, reception, and cultural environments are each partially responsible for the replication or

11 neutralization of textual meaning. The passage of textuality from creation (cultural production) to reception (letters) and then back into cultural creation mimics cultural evolution: meaning is continuously re-made by recombinations of literary sequences. Therefore, textual materials have the capacity to challenge strong hosts when the material becomes contagious.

Describing cultural change as an evolution might raise concerns, however. Some might find that cultural evolution evokes the idea of “survival of the fittest,” which can be used to solidify canon-formation. Even worse, the “fittest” might implicitly endorse eugenics through the circuit of cultural preferences and privileges, as it had for many modernist writers. Maren Linett argues that a rhetoric of eugenics seeps into many canonized writers who sought to improve literature through their selections (2). For example, in “Men and Women,” Virginia Woolf understands art as an attempt to “try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting” (195). While these concerns cannot be dismissed or ignored—and the metaphor has its limits—textual transduction focuses on concepts developing in modern microbiology rather than the popularization of Darwinian theory. In the latter, and even in academic portrayals as late as the 1970s, the “survival of the fittest” often refers to the survival of some group, such as the family, the nation, race, or species. But, as Richard Dawkins argues in

The Selfish Gene, many academics and layreaders have “made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene)” (2).

With textual transduction, I am similarity interested in the genetic materials of literature. The gene pool of literature, or more specifically of a single magazine, does not belong to any single author. Textual genes can circulate and replicate in surprising ways. But, like genes,

12 the textual materials that replicate frequently (or only once) are not ontologically better or fitter than others. In this study, I have chosen moments in serialized print culture when I expected to find mutation and better understand the mechanisms of literary change.

Cultural evolution might also raise concerns because it focuses on change, which can imply causal links. While I track patterns within different magazines, I try to avoid attributing literary or linguistic changes to any single variable. Textual transduction again helps here because it operates descriptively. I use transduction to describe how magazines change as different texts from readers, editors, and contributors come into contact with each other. The magazine is also a contextualized environment. These environments, then, play an important role in shaping the types of interactions that are possible. Nevertheless, there are moments when certain actors appear to have a significant role in changing the state of the magazine. Chapter one, in particular, examines the apparent effect readers’ letters had on the language within The

Crisis.

One critique of describing literary history as cultural evolution is “the chicken and the egg” conundrum. Does language change because new actors participate in print culture? Or, does print culture determine the possible literary and linguistic options? The answer, I argue, is somewhat both. More importantly, though, is that it is not necessary to know which (actor or network or system) was the prime mover, i.e. the chicken. Textual transduction seeks to explain the interdependent interactions between individuals and systems through exchanges of textual materials. These exchanges sometimes produce new options and other times do not. Furthermore, the interaction between two hosts—which could refer to reader and editor, two texts, two passages from different texts, etc.—occurs within the confines of an environment. Describing

13 how these interactions play out over time does not necessitate determining which came first.

After all, it is very likely that the genes of the chicken and egg predate either in some other configuration.

Language, in many ways, operates as a contagion, spreading as well as eliminating ideas and feelings. In Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald chronicles “the circulation of the language, images, and story lines” of outbreak narratives “to document how they became conventional and to introduce the narrative they produced in the process” (33). The propagation of narratives, whether through the form of literature, scientific data, or news, produces meaning. In a similar way, textual transduction prompts a reaction.

Contagions can replicate within a host or the host can produce antibodies to neutralized it. The spread of literary meaning affects readers and readers, in turn, affect meaning. Texts, in this sense, do “cultural work” by transferring meaning to numerous hosts. Jane Tompkins describes cultural work as a concept that explores “the way that literature has power in the world, to see how it connects with the beliefs and attitudes of large masses of readers so as to impress or move them deeply” (13). Literature, especially popular literature, has a way of simulating familiar predicaments for readers and offering solutions (15).

The cultural work of texts, however, is simultaneously limited by as well as capable of changing what Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls “contingencies of value.” Contingencies of value provide a framework that clarifies “the nature of literary—and, more broadly, aesthetic— value” (10). Texts that obtain cultural value—for any possible set of complex reasons—acquires more cultural purchase for maintaining or changing other cultural values. In particular, Smith argues that any system of literary value is “a continuously fluctuating or shifting system, for our

14 individual needs, interests, and resources are themselves functions of our continuously changing states in relation to an environment that may be relatively stable but is never absolutely fixed” (12). Reading a text and its reception as sequences within textual transduction articulates the interplay between individual values and the systems of values they inhabit. By tracing out the conversations and marking after-effects of textual transmission, transduction reveals how reader responses facilitated cultural change.

The seriality of magazines plays a role in tracking meaning within the fluctuating value- systems of cultures. Literary criticism that attends to reception in seriality—the back and forth between editors, readers, and contributors— can reveal how meaning replicates or deteriorates.

Each issue carries on conversations that privilege or demote different aspects of literature. Unlike books and collections of poetry, which obtain more stable locations within the literary field, magazines can change and reconfigure themselves in different ways. Temporality plays an important role in allowing textual transduction to unfold in seriality. With each issue of publication, ideas can incubate and replicate, extending beyond their immediate context. As ideas replicate and mutate, dominant forms and ideas begin to take shape. Seriality, as it extends across time, acts as a time-lapse in which literary values can fluctuate. James Mussell argues that the

“printed book puts its end into play (you always know how much there is to go), serial publishing, particularly for open-ended genres such as periodicals and newspapers, is predicated on not ending” (345). The indefinite end of serial magazines puts them in a state of fluidity.

Serialized magazines are key to understanding textual transduction and, therefore, how cultural values mutate over time. Hannah McGregor argues that ongoing digitization serialized objects allow “us to rethink our reading of the magazine as a form characterised by the complex

15 interplay of seriality and hypermediacy, a key dimension of the form that, particularly in the case of the middlebrow magazine, challenges familiar literary critical modes of reading” (250).

McGregor argues that these two key elements—seriality and heterogeneity—mark most magazines and require new scholarly approaches to understand periodicals. The diverse materials found in each issue and each issue’s variation from its predecessor compound and challenge critical approaches that seek to synthesize these objects into coherent cultural artifacts. Rather than each issue acting as a simple re-iteration of cultural values, ongoing conversations that spread across multiple issues can shore up or erode previously established values.

Describing culture as a sequence of production-reception-(re)production calls for a hybrid and mutated methodology. To address both localized symptoms and large responses, this study employs close and computational reading practices. Close reading examines the letter to the editor as symptom of literary contraction. The reader, infected with ideas drawn from earlier issues, replicates those ideas in the form of praise or works as an antibody against them. Close reading examines and articulates the dynamics of letters. The strands of close reading can manifest in numerous ways. Most often, close reading takes the form of what Paul Ricoeur describes as a “hermenuetics of suspicion,” or what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “paranoid reading.” Catherine Gallagher traces close reading as a resilient practice that descended from

New Criticism but “mixed well” with the structural meta-languages of Freud and Marx because its “concentration on the opacity of literary language in turn gave something back to each of those theoretical orientations” (140). Close reading’s resilience rests in its mutability but is marked by its intense focus on how the text reveals and or conceals itself.

16 Computational reading, on the other hand, works to extract cell lines: the heredities of replicated textual materials that contagiously spread across issues and volumes. These cell lines are surface features: the distributions and frequencies of words. Computational reading calculates word frequencies and measure lexical changes within large corpora. Models render links of affiliation and similarity, thereby enabling textual symptoms to be traced as they spread from their local setting (a single letter or issue) and infect other texts and genres. In the aggregation of surface qualities, though, computational reading begins to illustrate large-scale patterns, gesturing at explanations of a large scale.

Computational methods have already begun imagining texts in terms of genetic materials and, furthermore, have begun drawing from the methods of biology. In “Race, Writing, and Computation: Racial Difference and the US Novel, 1880-2000,” Richard Jean So, Hoyt

Long, and Yuancheng Zhu use computational models to explore how race figures into writing practices. The adopt a method called “sequence alignment,” which treats texts “objects like novels as long strands of DNA, and words as individual proteins.” Their work not only shows nontrivial patterns of language by “white” and “black” authors but also deconstructs such labels, placing them instead in terms of relationality and continuity. Laura McGrath, Devin Higgins, and

Arend Hintze also draw on sequence alignment in “Measuring Modernist Novelty.” Rather than showing similarities between writers, their work analyzes what is computationally seen as “new” in modernist novels by asking “has this string of text been seen before?” Here, computational methods look for mutated language instead of inherited language. Lastly, Ryan Cordell and

David Smith also tap into language of genetics in The Viral Texts Project. By following the textual reuse across American and large newspapers, they depict the virality and contagiousness

17 of certain texts and ideas. Computational models make it possible to track replication and mutation across many texts, which, in turn, highlight the various social and cultural dynamics that continuously modify language.

Textual transduction—as it explains the contact between literature and readers— articulates the significance of a text and its effect on its host and, even further, the surrounding environment. Textual transduction helps organize the synchronic and diachronic webs of language, enabling it to ask, following Sedgwick:

“What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it,

the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short,

is knowledge performative, and how best does one move amongst its causes

and effects?” (124).

Reader reception is where literature’s effects may or may not take hold. Readers’ letters reveal which formal aspects replicate and continue. By considering both the local (formal) and large

(cultural) effects of literary history, examining reader reception can ask what knowledge does— and how circulates in society and how societies change. Readers’ letters reveal both the contagious symptoms and resistant antibodies within language and literature. The social and cultural consequences of literature come into focus with a fuller examination of the imbricated relationships of authors, editors, and readers within serialized print culture.

Textual transduction operates within the gap of two theoretical theories, which Wai

Chee Dimock refers to as the strong and weak theories of literary criticism. Each theory depicts literature in distinctly different ways. Strong theory takes a top-down view of cultural creation and often portrays literature as a symptom within larger, structural paradigms. Weak theory

18 works to flatten strong theory’s hierarchical ordering and prefers to understand literature as networked and interrelated, working through similarity and affiliation rather than prognosis.

Despite encompassing the two dominant modes of literary criticism and history, however, neither can fully articulate the cultural evolution generated by reader feedback. This dissertation entangles weak and strong theory by ascertaining the ways readers evaluated style and, in doing so, energized literary taste with social, cultural, and political valences.

Strong theory refers to an array of methods that include “paranoid reading” or employ a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” These practices tend to tether all literary details to an overarching, grand narrative. Strong theory establishes strict scripts for meaning making. Literary devices become symptomatic of the entire system and nothing falls outside the system’s totality. Pierre

Bourdieu, to take one example, argues such when he writes that every “new mode of expression” eventually becomes old and elicits yet another “new transgression” (254–255). But, these supposed transgressions, which appear as “natural selection,” only mask the persistent “power of the dominant to pose, by their very existence, a definition of excellence” and, therefore, shore up their own personal wealth (whether social, cultural, or economic capital). In refuting a natural selection of literature, Bourdieu dismisses the possibility of cultural evolution. The host, in this case capitalism, has a resilient immunity to cultural change.

Strong theory reveals as well as forecloses certain knowledge. Strong theory, however, struggles to explain why textual variations occur and what variation means in and of itself. Bruno

Latour makes this argument in We Have Never Been Modern: “When [Bourdieu] speaks of fields of power...science, technology, texts, and the contents of activities disappear” (4). Bourdieu subsumes all disciplines, areas of work, and forms of knowledge production under a single

19 framework of capital. The inability for cultural expressions to have deep, meaningful difference leads to a dire recognition: meaningful cultural change is impossible through culture itself. The illusion of change re-conceals ideology. Culture and infection are intertwined as every

“expression” becomes a reflection of the dominant cultural values.

In strong theory, there is no antibody within culture, including literary criticism, that can immunize these symptoms. As Rita Felski describes it, the hermeneutics of suspicion assumes “the worst-case scenario and then rediscover[s] its own gloomy prognosis in every text”

(3). Although David Harvey disagrees with this interpretation, he admits that “both friends and foes alike” depict Marx as “a technological determinist, who thinks changes in the productive forces dictate the course of human history, including the evolution of social relations, mental conceptions, the rlaint to nature and the like” (192). A common interpretation of Marx’s theory ties cultural creation to the modes of production.

Some strong theories, of course, are “open to recruitment as a potential medium of political enlightenment or social transformation” (Felski, 6). While these variants of strong theory provide powerful counter narratives, they, too, are unable to explain cultural evolution.

Even here texts become secondary to a theoretical framework. Providing counter narratives helps to put different cultures within conversation but it does not show how that dialogue might unfold over time. Within strong theory, the text itself cannot explain its own effect on culture.

Weak theory, in contrast, encompasses reading practices that thrive off unscripted textual comparisons. Weak theory links textual similarities and affiliations. Dimock introduces the term in an article with the same name, where she follows textual phenomenon as it infectiously spreads across different genres and activates different symptoms. By using the

20 metaphor of infection, Dimock establishes that the assemblage of host-infection mutually inform one another through local, input-bearing reactions rather than largely predetermined conclusions.

Unlike the unchangeable picture of strong theory, weak theory follows the “dispersed, episodic webs of association, not supervised and not formalizable” and makes it “an open question what is primary, what is determinative, what counts as the center and what counts as the margins” (Dimock, 737). Process-oriented and generative rather than diagnostic and final, weak theory recognizes the permeability of boundaries and repairs bonds across networks.

Weak theory follows a line of thinking that includes Bruno Latour and Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick. Latour, for example, considers the social to be a “type of connection between things that are not themselves social” (5). He acknowledges that “this definition seems absurd” and

“risks diluting sociology to mean any type of aggregate from chemical bonds to legal ties...But this is precisely the point that this alternative branch of social theory wishes to make as all those heterogeneous elements might be assembled anew in some given state of affairs.” For whenever a “new law is voted” or “a new catastrophe occurs, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together” (6). For Latour, unlike Bourdieu, a new expression prompts a systemic response. Latour’s sense of a reshuffling society provides space for responsivity and cultural change.

Weak theory, as described by Dimock, is not alone in casting doubt on strong theory’s extensive claims. Distant reading practices have similarly questioned strong theory’s tendencies.

In The History Manifesto, Jo Guldi and David Armitage argue for a large-scale and expansive description of cultural change that is not beholden to the scripts of strong theory. Too often, they argue, “The prison and the coffeehouse became the two poles of macro-history, the pessimistic

21 and the optimistic account of modern institutions, into which micro-historians of the Short Past poured their finer-grained details” (51). Ted Underwood makes a similar claim when he writes,

“[there is a] surprising amount of consensus about certain aesthetic and

rhetorical choices...Our titles are often organized by an implicit tableau: ‘The

Madwoman in the Attic,’ ‘Unpacking My Library,’…They all evoke a brief

episode from which you can unfold a larger structure of feeling” (2).

Diverse scholarly practices have recently challenged strong theory’s dominant presence in humanistic studies and have called for renewed interest in looser affiliations and similarities.

But, why do these new associations matter? Although weak theory can repair the ignored links between texts and cultural networks, many argue that it removes the political force of literary criticism. As Tim Weintzen argues,

“[s]trong theory has its virtues, to be sure. Even paranoia, with its limited

political efficacy, is operational. If we live with the paranoia of ecological

collapse—and I certainly do—then this strong theory does political work that

is utterly necessary. Indeed, it is political work that might be hard to motivate

by a weak theory alone.”

Paranoid reading of literature provides an impetus for a critical resistance that challenges power and prompts change.

Without the readers’ responses, weak and strong theories have to speculate on the reception of cultural works and, therefore, each theory potentially misses the consequences of literature. Reader responses—and the frequent editorial and authorial responses in return— showcase the consequentiality of literature in a way that the text itself cannot. The centrality and

22 urgency of understanding the cultural effects of literature and criticism is visible in Modernism/ modernity special issue, “Weak Theory,” and the more than 27 published responses it generated.

As Weintzen alludes to, however, part of the problem with each of these theoretical option is that both lack an analysis of what “motivates.” Because each side of this debate frequently overlooks readers’ reception, both weak and strong theories fail to explain the after-lives of texts and their cultural repercussions and reparations.

The earlier twentieth century is a critical time when considering reader responses in the interplay of weak and strong theory as well as the infectiousness of literature and reception. Print culture in the United States was transforming and becoming more diverse than it had any time before. Serialized print culture became an early form of mass media. The interactions between magazine readers, editors, and authors provide historical parallels to our contemporary moment in which ideologies circulate and compete through online platforms.

Governmental administration, technological advancements, and a reconfiguration of social expectations and experiences around print culture gradually set the foundation for mass media in print culture. The cultural conditions of mass media re-molded the figure of the reader.

Before 1845, the United States postal service was primarily dedicated to the “wide circulation of political news” through newspapers, which were the cheapest form of print exchange (Henkin,

21). The Postal Act of 1851, however, reduced the costs of personal mail, making it more viable for individuals to send messages to friends and family. The intervention of governmental administration had initiated a gradual shift in the public perception of print culture. By 1874, personal postage became so widespread that the International Postal Congress agreed on a system that allowed correspondents from various countries to “post to one another for a single

23 flat (and cheap) rate of international postage that did not depend on either distance or diplomatic relations between the countries of the letter’s origin and destination” (173). Personal correspondence had become common place enough to warrant its extension overseas and across borders.

In tandem with these administrative decisions, technological advancements also helped make print culture an integral part of personal lives. In 1869, half-tone printing made it cheaper to reproduce images, which facilitated the rise of advertisements and leisure reading. A year later, the rotary press accelerated the speed at which information could be printed. A decade after that, the linotype sped up print production even more with a new design that enabled the “typesetter to use a keyboard something like that of a typewriter or word processor to select a brass matrix for each letter in a line, instead of having to select each letter by hand from boxes of type” (Scholes and Wulfman, 28). Technological advancements further changed public experience of print culture by making it more widespread, accessible, and faster to produce.

The social experience surrounding print culture and correspondence had also changed over the course of the nineteenth century. While most Americans in the 1820s did not engage in any “interactive, long-distance communications network,” most of them did by 1870 (Henkin, 2).

David Henkin, in The Postal Age, asserts that “Increased [print] mobility enhanced the appeal, utility, and economic viability of a medium that would be redefined in the United States around the desire of ordinary people to communicate with those lived elsewhere” (29). The desires, interests, and literary tastes of ordinary people helped to remap the landscape of print culture.

Before the late nineteenth century, most magazines fell into two categories: expensive, high quality periodicals and cheap weeklies. In the nineteenth century, the “average citizen was

24 not a magazine reader,” Theodore Peterson writes (2). Magazines such as Century, Harper’s, and

Scribner’s were available to readers with leisure, wealth, and wide ranging of tastes. A single issue often included disparate articles such as “Street Scenes of India” and “The Social Side of

Yachting” (3). These seemingly unrelated topics indicate the interests of a specific, imagined reader. Frederick Lewis Allen, noting the changes of periodicals over fifty years, portrays the ideal reader of the nineteenth century magazine as a kind of Renaissance man:

“...the ideal of the educated man, the philosopher, who is at home not merely

in his own land and in his own age, but in all lands and all ages; from whose

point of perspective the Babylonian seal-workers are as interesting as the

Pittsburgh steelworkers” (qtd. in Peterson, 3).

The imagined reader of the nineteenth, shared by other editors of large periodicals, was no longer a recognizable figure by the twentieth. The vast amounts of diverse readers beneath the “high stratum of genteel readers” became the new target audiences of the twentieth century (4).

The changes to nineteenth century print culture reconfigured publication practices, changing serialized texts from primarily news and information to a stronger emphasis on the readers’ personal interests. “Historians agree,” Jean Marie Lutes writes, “that at the turn of the twentieth century, readers in the United States had access to more and different kinds of journals than at any other time in the nation’s history” (337). The two decades following the Civil War saw a “mania of magazine-starting” (Peterson, 2). The number of American periodicals had increased from approximately 700 in 1865 to 3,300 in 1885. Improved literacy for many people further created a diverse print culture (Scholes and Wulfman, 29; National Assessment of Adult

Literacy).

25 As different readers entered print culture, their interests changed the literary ecosystem. Lutes notes that the “African American press was especially noteworthy” and

“[b]etween 1895 and 1915, more African American newspapers—some twelve hundred—were launched than in any other era of American history” (337). In addition,

“the reader of the mass press became increasingly defined as female. This

gendered development came in tandem with the industry’s embrace of

commodity culture and movement away from the vision of the press as an

instrument of a unified political community engaged in rational

debate” (338).

Ultimately, Lutes argues, “nothing challenged the traditional republican associations of the press as much as the new inclusion of women in the reading audience.” Print culture, especially the proliferation of magazines, served a new function: to appeal to the growing and diverse interests of its readers.

Editors were able to reach these vast new audiences by adopting new business models centered on advertising, which allowed them to lower the costs of magazines. The industry of advertising was a significant catalyst for the changing ecosystem of print culture for periodicals and facilitated the changing figure of the reader. In 1893, Frank Munsey of Munsey’s Magazine set the price of each issue below the cost of production. He recuperated these losses with advertisement revenues. McClure’s and Cosmopolitan also shifted towards an advertisements-as- revenue business model and lowered their issue costs to ten cents (Garvey, 10). The new business model, espoused by most national periodicals, drastically changed print production. Between

1897 and 1922, the Saturday Evening Post’s circulation grew from 2,231 readers to 2,187,024

26 (Peterson, 12). Its advertising revenue grew even faster, from $6,933 to $28,278,755. Ads-driven revenue in the magazine industry further spurred a reconceptualization of who and what the reader was.

The integration of advertisements in the production of periodicals solidified the magazine’s need to listen and appeal to its reading public. In 1930, Frank Luther Mott recognized that “Periodicals must keep very close to their public; they must catch the slightest nuances of popular taste” (2). Readers’ interests were always a significant facet of any publication, but ads-driven revenue made it financially viable (if not necessary) to identify, address, and converse with a readership. Even small, coterie periodicals understood that their readers had more specific tastes than their “genteel” predecessors. The result of the changing landscape of nineteenth century print culture gave rise to a new kind of magazine reader in the twentieth. The interests of the reader could no longer be assumed, but became known through printed conversations and correspondences as well as the tactics and methods of advertising.

Readers wrote letters in an attempt to shape magazine content to their interests. Each letter acts as an infectious organism that could prompt a response from various hosts. These letters were sometimes successful at changing their environment and sometimes not. Each chapter examines a different result of textual transduction and represent one possible phase of cultural mutation: infection (replication), inoculation (neutralization), transformation

(recombination), environmental (selective) pressures.

Chapter 1, “Readerly Revisions: Letters to the Editors in The Crisis,” examines readers’ calls for more progressive depictions of Black lives and experience in fiction. Although

The Crisis, the newsletter and literary magazine of the NAACP, promoted social justice and

27 equality from the beginning, the readers were integral in extending this equality to the literary sections of the magazine. The Crisis helped foster the beginnings of the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance. Early writers of the magazine developed core values in each of these movements, which were then broadcasted to a national and eventually international audience.

The readers’ letters formed a kind of literary and social activism. The readers called for fiction writers to modify their prose when discussing race and race pride. The readers not only demanded progressive representation, their letters also modeled the type of writing they sought to read. In the early years of The Crisis, other genres emulated the language found in the readers’ letters. These letters, then, can be read as a form of infectious transduction. Their letters played a significant role in changing the cultural environment and offer a microcosm The Crisis. As readers sought to infect the The Crisis with their own interests, so too did the magazine try to change American race logic. Through literary transduction, the consumers could change the producers’ output and reconfigure the dominant discourse.

If Chapter 1 examines readers who successfully changed the immediate environment in their magazine, Chapter 2, “Combative Collaboration: Readers in the Cultural Field of The Little

Review,” looks at the opposite effect: readers unable to change their magazine’s content. The

Little Review began as an avant-garde literary magazine and proponent of socialist and anarchistic politics. The magazine, however, abandoned its political origins after its notorious

Blank Issue, which was published without literature and offered as a “Want Ad” for better art.

Many readers opposed this change and urged the editors to select politically conscious art. The readers failed to convince the editors. But, their contentious letters generated discussions about art’s responsibility to culture and forced the editors to clarify their art-for-art’s sake doctrine. The

28 Blank Issue, in effect, worked to immunize art from politics. Rather than simply reading this reaction as an erasure of politics, though, the editors clarifying remarks act as antibodies, visible signals that emerge as a result of readers’ persistence. Although the editors resist the readers’ contagiousness, they nevertheless show a response.

Chapter 3, “The Merits of Mediocrity: Harriet Monroe’s Great Audience and Poetic

Composting,” contends that readers of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse assisted in the transformation of supposedly mediocre poetry. Poetry was (and continues to be) a literary magazine, which helped start the Imagists and supported vers libre. Harriet Monroe, the editor, famously disagreed with Ezra Pound about the role of the audience. She believed that the audience could provide poets with a responsive public and participate in poetic crafting. Poetry encouraged poets to take up readers’ suggestions by framing imitation and variation as improvement. Readers’ feedback acts as a form of textual transformation in which poets take up pieces of previously published works and recombine them to create new textual characteristics. Readers’ praise and criticism elevate certain poetical forms and facilitate their continuation in later works. The recombination of textual fragments produces a cell-line or literary lineage of poetic form that continues across multiple issues. These cell lines make it possible to track the gradual cultural evolution within the magazine.

Chapter 4, “Surface Socialism: Incompatible Readers in The Masses,” looks the contentious debates between socialist readers. Due to inflated cost of print production caused by

World War I, The Masses had to merge with fellow socialist magazine The New Review. The merger of these two magazines sparked off a feud between like-minded socialists. Despite their similarities, readers of each magazine accused the other of being too immature or too

29 curmudgeonly to progress the socialist cause. United ideologically, the exchanges between the two groups reveal how politics can be animated on the surface level of textuality. Recovering the politics that reside on the surface of texts, rather than their depths, shows how literary affects can create tension between different communities of readers.

Readers’ letters in magazines provide continuous evaluations of literature. Readerly updates not only create a historical reception of reader response but also mark shifts and changes in cultural evolution. Many readers understood literature to be a vehicle of social change or stagnation. The seriality of magazines enables these letters to aggregate and generate power from their weak but frequent occurrences. By providing their evaluations, readers engaged in the efforts to prompt cultural change.

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33 Methodology

Describing culture as a sequence of production, reception, and replication attends to the infectious nature of readers’ letters as well as the environmental pressures that constrain those responses. With each new issue, letters and other texts reflect on previous publications. The ongoing conversations between readers, editors, and other writers, sustain or undo the cultural values constructed within each magazine. These cultural values materialize between the weak affiliations of readers and writers responding to each other and the strong forces that underpin these conversations, including editorial selections and systemic pressures that are larger than any magazine’s immediate environment. As such, textual transduction calls for a hybrid and mutated methodology. To address both localized symptoms and large responses, this study employs close and computational reading practices.

The hybrid method of close and computational reading allows me to move beyond a static model of literature and understand it instead as a dynamic system. Moving across different textual objects and leveraging different scales of analysis enables me to assess dimensions of literary influence and change. In other words, this hybrid method attends to the morphology of culture, asking how dominant literary forms weaken and how non-dominant forms gain strength.

Readers saw literary culture continuously changing. Tracking these changes within language elucidates the priorities of taste by highlighting the concepts that are most frequently circulated.

It is not simply a case of language reflecting cultural values, though. Language constructs and maintains those cultural values but also provides opportunities to destabilize taste and shift cultural capital to different actors. The emergence of a new style or literary interest can, in turn, reshape the literary environment and power dynamics.

34 Seriality

The seriality of magazines illuminates the network of actors that influence the shape of print culture as well as how literary priorities and tastes change. In “The Dialogics of

Modernism(s) in the New Age,” Ann Ardis focuses on A.R. Orage’s editorship of the New Age to show how he established “‘neutral ground where intelligences may meet on equal terms’ in public debate about politics, literature, and the arts” (409). Ardis follows the comments of readers, contributors, and even editorial staff who “pummeled” Pound’s contributions to the magazine. Her work joins other research that recovers “a more richly heterogeneous record of early twentieth-century cultural debates about the arts than current scholarship on the pluralization of modernism is able to index.” Scholars such as Michael North, George Bornstein, and Alan Golding have also bound together the arrays of canonically modernist and non- modernist aesthetics (Golding, 42). Golding has specifically argued that modernist taste and aesthetics formed collectively in the magazines. The recovery of this vast connectivity, John

Timberman Newcomb argues, highlights “the often mutually beneficially dialectical tension between magazines” (258). The relationships between magazines and strikingly non-modernist texts has provided a fuller historical account of the early twentieth century than the canonical narrative of High Modernism offered.

Unlike books and collections of poetry, which obtain more stable locations within the literary field, magazines can change and reconfigure themselves in different ways. James

Mussell argues that the “printed book puts its end into play (you always know how much there is to go), serial publishing, particularly for open-ended genres such as periodicals and newspapers, is predicated on not ending” (345). Similarly, Hannah McGregor argues that ongoing digitization

35 projects allow “us to rethink our reading of the magazine as a form characterised by the complex interplay of seriality and hypermediacy, a key dimension of the form that, particularly in the case of the middlebrow magazine, challenges familiar literary critical modes of reading” (250).

McGregor argues that these two key elements—seriality and heterogeneity—mark most magazines and require new scholarly approaches to understand periodicals. The diverse materials found internally in each issue and each issue’s external variation from its predecessor compound and challenge critical approaches that seek to synthesize these objects into coherent cultural artifacts.

Periodicals are marked with the tension of producing new materials while maintaining a coherent discourse. Margaret Beetham argues that the primary function of periodicals is to signify and construct meaning: “Each article, each periodical number, was and is part of a complex process in which writers, editors, publishers and readers engaged in trying to understand themselves and their society; that is, they struggled to make their world meaningful” (20). Each magazine articulates “newness” according to its own values.

Furthermore, every new issue re-stages the contest of literary taste. As a continuous revision of the literary scene, the temporality of magazines constantly animates power dynamics that debate

“good” or “bad” art.

The rhythm of expansion and synthesis was essential to opening up connections between diverse topics and fields and then unifying them into a coherent narrative. In “Imperial/

Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News,” Patrick Collier shows how “proto-modernist aesthetics” and English imperialism emerged together, mutually creating an “aesthetic order” that shaped the magazine and its readers’ worldview (488). Bartholomew Brinkman has similarly

36 demonstrated how the discourse within Poetry, a Magazine of Verse combined with the formatting styles and page layouts, opening up genres of poetry as something different than verse

(22).

Although these scholarly works and others have begun charting the landscape of periodicals and the genres that appear within them, the map remains largely unmarked due to challenges of dialogism and seriality in an era of print mass media. Dallas Liddle, in The

Dynamics of Genre, turns to large-scale digital analysis to draw out the “underlying forces at work within British print culture history” that “would help us assess the extent to which individual writers worked with or against contemporary conventions.” Developing such methods further in “Genre: ‘Distant Reading’ and the Goals of Periodicals Research”, he argues,

Victorian periodicals, both as individual texts and as a field of study, may

ultimately only make sense if we learn to see them as the visible traces of a

functional and dynamic field of communication that was exactly the opposite

of a chaotic wilderness—that was in fact a complex distributed system of

partly cooperating and partly competing information channels in which texts

took shape in relation to a large, complex, dynamic, and evolving system of

systems (397).

Periodicals constantly shifted, and literary genres and artistic values underwent frequent change and re-evaluation.

The critical attention to seriality and heterogeneity is moving modernist studies beyond specific aesthetic or political frameworks. As more corners of periodical studies are charted, more actors are emerging as significant organizers and producers of this vast, evolving system.

37 Works from Matthew Philpotts and Nathan K. Hensley attend to the various editors who maintained large branches of expansive networks, within which even more actors were working.

Jana Smith Elford has similarly brought to light women activists who were integral to periodical production in “Recovering Women’s History with Network Analysis: A Case Study of the Fabian

News.” In describing the recovery of so many actors in periodicals, John Fagg, Matthew Pethers, and Robin Vandome have compared magazines and newspapers to pre-digital precursors of social media. “Nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers” they argue, “offer…a fertile lens through which Americanists can begin to engage with the question of how social connections were forged and furthered in the pre-digital age. In fact, scholarly accounts of antebellum periodical culture have long been implicitly concerned with social networks” (94). The networks of print media during the nineteenth and twentieth century served as a centripetal force, maintaining the perceived unity or coherence of seriality and heterogeneous materials.

Close and Computational Readings

Unlike books or collections of poems, magazines and other serialized publications operate on continuation and change. Serialization emphasizes the fluidity of change and how difference is not categorical but a degree of similarity and dissimilarity. James Mussell argues that the magazine balance between the “old” and the “new.” The “nineteenth-century periodical,” he argues, “was a genre predicated upon the new. However, in order to make sense of a social world constantly in flux, the new was represented according to generic conventions that related it to the familiar” (95). The flux of new and old extend beyond formal qualities of magazines. The constant shift of new and old affects language as well as abstract themes. A poem in one issue of a magazine might borrow the same diction and style from a poem published previously. Or,

38 another poem might re-articulate the same theme as another work but use very different language. Attending to the seriality of print culture helps foreground how difference and sameness between texts can slide gradually over time and at different planes of textuality.

Michael Witmore argues persuasively that “a text is a text because it is massively addressable at different scales of analysis. Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction” (2010). Within magazine culture, these levels of textuality multiply as they are put in relation to other serialized texts.

The degree of similarity between texts can change unevenly over time and occur at different levels of textuality. No single reading method can attend to the multiple, moving levels of textuality within serialized print culture. Therefore, in order to track the evolution of magazine cultures, I employ close and computational reading.

Close reading examines the letter to the editor as symptom of literary contraction. The reader, infected with ideas drawn from earlier issues, replicates those ideas in the form of praise or works as an antibody against them. Close reading explicates the dense materials of literariness, such as figurative language and other formal features, and clarifies how artistic techniques synthesize into themes or reveal larger structures.

Computational reading, on the other hand, works to extract cell lines: the heredities of textual materials that replicate across issues and volumes. These cell lines are surface features; they are the distributions and frequencies of words. Computational reading calculates word frequencies and measure lexical changes within large corpora. Models of these surface features then illuminate large-scale textual patterns, which enables those details to organize within interpretable frameworks of shifting discourses, interests, or styles.

39 Although close reading and computational reading begin from positions of strong theory and weak theory respectively (discussed in the Introduction), the two often coalesce when examining serialized print cultures. In “Modeling Modernist Dialogism,” Adam Hammond,

Julian Brooke, and Graeme Hirst develop “a hybrid approach that places distant and close reading in a reciprocal dialogue, based on the conviction that each stands to benefit from the perspective that the other has to offer” (53). Alison Booth similarly calls for a “mid-range reading” that combines “bibliography, feminist historiography, network visualizations, and narrative theory, along with various digital humanities tools and practices” and provides a

“unique approach to a morphology of female biography” (621). My use of computational and close reading to study readers’ letters similarly relies on two scales of analysis.

In addition to leveraging two scales of analysis, my method also examines how two scales of culture interact with each other as active parts of the same system (even when they conflict). Framing literary production in terms of textual transduction foregrounds the moments when textual features act as symptoms of a larger system as well as times different features work against that same system.

Topic modeling in chapters one, two, and four measures the textual changes across issues and volumes. Topic modeling, in a simplified sense, can be imagined as a process that reads through a corpus twice. The first time the process finds topics in the corpus. Topics are sets of words that frequently appear together. Then, the process reads through the corpus again, assigning those topics to each document. The goal of topic modeling is to return significant topics, or the subject matter of documents.

40 In “Topic Modeling and Figurative Language,” Lisa Marie Rhody describes topic modeling as someone trying to predict what their neighbors might pick up at the farmer's market based on past selections:

Examining the quantities and varieties of produce in each basket, you could

begin to predict not only the range of produce that might have been at the

farmers’ market but also the relative quantities. Over the course of sampling

your neighbors’ baskets, you come to the conclusion that the selection of

produce at the farmer’s market consists of 20% green apples, 20% red apples,

15% pears, 10% winter squash, 10% cantaloupe, 5% corn, 5% beans, 5%

tomatoes and 5% assorted other kinds of produce that were different enough

from one another that it makes sense to just call them miscellaneous. As more

neighbors arrive, with baskets to examine, you can refine your predictions about

what the available selection of produce have been at the market.

Although there is always some error, topic modeling similarly guesses at what is in each document. After reading through a corpus, where it recognizes the different topics, topic modeling then tries to guess at what topics are in each document. The model goes through texts highlighting words that it believes belong together as topics. The number of topics in a corpus is determined by the user. A document can have multiple, significant topics.

Topic modeling helps track the shifting interests and priorities within magazine culture.

Topic modeling captures a level of language that I am most interested in: subjects. Topic modeling tries to reconstruct what writers wrote about. The “what” of writing differs from the style or “how” texts are written, and this has certain implications for textual analysis.

41 Subject material is easy to change. Writers can write about different topics more easily than they can change how they write about those subjects. As I'll explain a little further down, the difficulty of changing your style makes style particularly good for discerning different authors through computational methods. That same feature, however, can occlude moments when a writer changes her subject matter.

Topic modeling's attention to content rather than style makes it particularly useful for studying magazines and serialized print culture. Changing topics in magazines is somewhat akin to trending topics and hashtags in social media. It is one marker of cultural significance and signals what editors, writers, and readers seemed to care about. While stylistics captures aspects of writing that writers struggle to leave behind, topic models look at a level of textuality that is very easy to change.

Stylometry (the “how” of writing) was an early method for computational text analysis, in particular for authorship attribution (“Inference in an Authorship Problem,”

Mosteller and Wallace). The success of stylometry is in its ability to identify authors by their use of seemingly insignificant words, especially prepositions. These words (often called stopwords) effectively differentiate who wrote what. Simon Fuller and James Sullivan use text analysis to explore authorship attribution in “Structure over Style: Collaborative Authorship and the Revival of Literary Capitalism” (2017). Put another way, stylometry (and other methods that rely on word counts) became very good at guessing (identifying) different authors by the seemingly unimportant words they used—even when an author wrote about different subjects.

I think that the ability to (frequently) identify an author regardless of the subject has significance. It suggests, to me, that stylometry captures a level of language that is very difficult

42 to change; that level of language persists within an author across whatever subject she writes about. There are, of course, some immediate exceptions to this conjecture. James Joyce's Ulysses exhibits a particularly unstable and volatile style within itself. Also, T.S. Eliot's “The Waste

Land” is well-known for its many speakers, which “He Do The Police”, a digital project, explores computationally. These are perhaps unique examples, though. In “Measuring Modernist

Novelty,” Laura McGrath, Devin Higgins, and Arend Hintze use computational text analysis to understand stylistic newness or novelty within texts. Other examples, swing in the opposite direction. In “‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude

Stein's The Making of Americans,” Tanya Clement uses distant reading to better understand the hyper-repetition in Stein's work (Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23.3, 2008).

My reason for topic modeling, then, is based on the common tendencies of magazine writers and seriality—not some sense that topic models are better than stylistics methods. While style is important, I've found topics to be reliable signals of cultural change. Computational text analysis, however, involves a lot of moving pieces. There is the corpus, which can change as new documents are added, and the computation. Within each of those, there are even more options that can reshape the results—such as removing or keeping stopwords. While topic modeling works for me for now, it is possible that new developments, or even reconfigurations of old pieces, might be cause to revisit stylistics in the future.

Topic model provides a method for finding the changing interests of writers within a corpus. By comparing topic ratios between documents, we can begin to understand how genres fluctuate over time (whether they adopt new topics or drop old ones) and whether some genres became more or less like others in terms of content. Cosine similarity effectively does this task

43 for datasets like a topic model. Instead of focusing on a single, prevalent topic, cosine similarity measures the entire mixture of topics within a document and compares that mixture (or vector) to other documents, resulting in a simple scale (zero to one) of document similarity. Scott Weingart

(2012) argues that the cosine similarity of topic ratios better reflects textual similarity than extracting the rise and fall of a single topic across documents. Andrew Piper (2018, 69) describes the attention to all topics within a document as “reading topologically,” where instead of defining documents as predominately about a topic, this method retains a sense that topics “reside across all documents in different states of likelihood.” Topic modeling, then, can move beyond descriptions of documents and allow “us to see how ideas cohere, but also fade away.” The changing distributions of topics in documents (the way they merge and blur over time) provides a revealing signal of cultural change, and, as Ted Underwood (2018, 1) argues, effectively serve

“as a proxy for human judgments about social difference.” Tracking the similarities of genres as they change illuminates their fluctuations and hybridity. This method highlights the cohesion and gravitational pull of some genres within the magazine, such as letters and fiction.

Although topic modeling effectively constructs how discourses change, it approaches language in a very literal sense—documents have topics and those topics are consistent. Using the cosine similarities of topic ratio helps move past this simple model, but even here language differs only in the various mixtures of topics within documents. To examine the richer depths of literature, chapter 3 employs doc2vec.

Doc2vec builds off its predecessor and namesake, word2vec, and starting there will explain why doc2vec can model poetry and literary influence. Word2vec is a computational process designed to capture the semantic relationships between words as they are used within a

44 given corpus. So, doc2vec will discover different semantics in different corpora of texts. For example, the words “king,” “queen,” “man,” and “woman” share certain, culturally determined meanings that convey gender and status. Unlike most machine learning algorithms, word2vec can successfully reconstruct these meanings after reading through a large corpus. That is, a word2vec model can predict cultural semantics with mathematical formulas, such as “king” minus “man” equals “queen.” By capturing the relationships between words, word2vec improves on other methods because it recreates polysemy and understands analogies.

Word2vec recognizes that words can have multiple connotations and captures each connotation by looking at a word’s context. Word2vec, for instance, can determine the meaning of “bank” by looking at nearby words for “river” or “finances.” This differs from other computational approaches which would only know “bank” as a four-character sting of text. In the case of word2vec, concepts of “bank” are captured and can be recreated by adding context clues.

Benjamin Schmidt argues that word embedding models, like word2vec, “merit attention because they allow a much richer exploration of the vocabularies or discursive spaces implied by massive collections of texts than most other [computational] reductions out there.” Applying word2vec to a corpus enables a large-scale computational reading that is more attuned to cultural meanings than most computational models, making it a useful candidate for studying poetical language that reoccurs in slightly modulated forms. While word2vec transforms a corpus into a single, long string of text, doc2vec remembers the borders of documents, which can be set for issues of a magazine, individual poems, novels, or other documents. Doc2vec takes the relationships of words that word2vec discovers and re-packages them within textual boundaries.

45 Doc2vec, therefore, maintains a specific theory of language that harmonizes with poetics: semantics emerge from context. Each word maintains its many meanings by packaging those meanings as coordinates (vectors) that point toward other words that share the same semantic space. A single word’s multiple meanings can be brought forth or dismissed by shuttling in different accompanying words. For these reasons, Quoc Le and Tomas Mikilov, the developers of word2vec and doc2vec, report that doc2vec improves on previous methods by recovering cultural semantics and maintaining the order of words (2014). Doc2vec’s logic of semantics maps onto figurative language. Similar diction in concentrated textual spaces orients mathematical vectors as if turning the signifiers of words towards the same direction. Figurative language likewise relocates the meaning of a text outside the literalness of words’ definitions.

46 Figure 1. Doc2vec Clustering of Genres in the Modernist Journal Project

Figure 1 illustrates how different genres use language differently. Each color represents as different genre. These genres cluster together based on their textual similarity. So, advertisements, which appear in blue at the bottom of the graph, are separated from the main cluster. Advertisements separation indicates that the language of ads is significantly different than language in other genres. Within the larger cluster, articles (green) and letters (orange) overlap on the right side of the graph. The overlap of these two genres—their shared language— likely suggests that authors of these genres were in conversation with each other.

47 Figure 2. Doc2vec Clustering of Magazines in the Modernist Journals Project

Rather than looking at genres within magazines, Figure 2 illustrates the issues of different magazines. Each issue appears as a single dot and is colored based on which magazine that published it. Again, the visualization reflect certain expectations of literary history. The two most politically active magazines within this corpus (The Crisis in red and The Masses in brown) are separated on the left side of the graph. The apolitical magazines, such as The Little Review and

48 Poetry appear on the right.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate doc2vec’s effectiveness at discerning distinct literary communities and genres by clustering documents encoded in the Modernist Journals Project

(MJP). Doc2vec groups documents of the same genre (Figure 1) and from the same magazine

(Figure 2). The visualizations above indicate that the computational processes are reproducing general intuitions about literary history, namely different magazines and different genres use language differently and, therefore, mobilize different semantics. The visualizations above reflect the MJP’s encoding practices, which markup genres within an issue as a bundle. So, all the poems in a single issue are bound together and, when they are parsed for computation, they appear as if a single string. Although the encoding is not as precise as a human reader, the markup does not prevent documents from clustering intuitively. Doc2vec can leverage this encoding practice to address another level of textuality, like peeling off a layer of an onion, and begin to model the ways genres inflect each other over time.

Figure 3. Diagram of Genre Influence in Poetry, a Magazine of Verse

49 Figure 3 shows the four main genres in Poetry—poetry, letters, articles, and advertisements—and how they influence each other over time. The genres in Figure 3 differ from

Figures 1 and 2. In Figure 3, genres are bundled together and their similarities to other genres are averaged. Here, the data processing becomes important for interpreting the graph. The graph visualizes data that fulfills two conditions. The first condition filters out any semantic similarity that falls below a specified threshold, removing similarities that could be false positives. The second condition removes information that does not match intuitive judgments about influence.

Namely, influence works chronologically, so a text printed in 1917 could not have influenced a text published in 1913.1

The ribbons that span across the interior of the circle indicate similarities between genres. The graph shows the trajectories of influences amongst each genre. In particular, the

“poetry” ribbon that curls towards the “letters” arc suggests a semantic drift that moved from poems to the language of readers. This movement likely highlights the readers who discussed

1 As Johanna Drucker argues in “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” this data filtering is more precisely an act and object of capta, or information that is captured and constructed rather than given or natural (as the etymology of data implies). An author’s archival materials might reveal ways that a manuscript could indeed influence a text published at an earlier date, whether through publication delays or correspondences. Drucker points exactly to the indefiniteness of publication dates as an example of data acting as capta. Data/capta runs the risk of presenting itself as objective, but data/capta also gestures to the parallax of research. Data can be assembled and disassembled in various ways to highlight different aspects of analysis. Similar to close reading, if not more so, computational text analysis has the capacity to re- prioritize information, shuttling in new and diverse capta, in order to complicate or estrange the conventions of literary analysis. As Stephen Ramsay notes in Reading Machines, textual data does not try to “solve Woolf,” but seeks “to ensure that discussion of The Waves continues” (15). Computational text analysis does not solve literature or erase close reading, but it does add more pieces.

50 poetry through quoting, paraphrasing, or possibly adopting the linguistic patterns of the poems they read. A reader, perhaps, intentionally or unintentionally mimicked the writing styles of poems that she was reading and wrote down a similar cluster of words in her own letter. Readers discussing poems in a magazine for poetry is not significant. And yet, the graph elucidates how language can be adopted and shows the flow of semantics within the magazine. The modes of cultural production and the creation of taste manifests here as a ribbon unfurling from one arc to another. Although language modulates differently in each genre, doc2vec illustrates the hidden currents of semantics that run beneath the surface.

Doc2vec, though significantly different, shares conceptual similarities with topic modeling. Both models can attend to the similarity of texts. Texts with high degrees of similarities likely share some cultural connection that is worth further exploration. Sometimes these connections are red-herrings. Often, though, these similarities unearth deeper meanings and work to explain how cultural values are circulated and evolve over time. Topic modeling and doc2vec, then, help elucidate the relationships that form between readers, writers, and editors.

These relationships are networked, but also change with each issue. Both computational approaches model language as a dynamic system with multiple actors.

Conclusion

Close and computational reading provide complementary evidence of literary production. Together, both classes of evidence work to model literature has an evolving system, constrained by environmental pressures but also capable of change. Readers’ letters act as important links that actively shaped literary production. While these letters prompted reactions from writers, editors, and other readers, they were also constrained by larger cultural systems.

51 Letters were immediately controlled by editorial selection. But, even editors were limited in their choices.

Readers’ letters then call attention to new timelines and new actors of literary production, then the question of literary criticism cannot only ask what dominant forms of literature are present. Literary criticism must content with who or what keeps it there. How are dominant forms of literature made durable or weakened? How does cultural capital change hands? To engage these questions, criticism must contend with different scales of analysis and work to understand how provisional, coincidental, even accidental literary similarities can transform into strong structures of cultural capital and literary prestige. Cultural studies should continue to interrogate the dominant forms within literature but must also ask who or what allowed those forms there in the first place. I argue that textual transduction as a hybrid method makes it possible to shuttle between different scales of analysis, link up different critical reading strategies, and articulate the ways that readers and writers alike maintain cultural power through the circulation of language and literature.

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56 Readerly Revisions: Letters to the Editor in The Crisis

Introduction

As early as the fourth issue of The Crisis (February 1911), W. E. B. Du Bois called on readers to assist in the creation of the magazine’s content. He offered this proposal:

Do not hesitate to criticize us. We want ideas. We want short, live articles,

with facts done into English. We are not anxious for opinion and we write

poetry ourselves. If you do not get your copy, write us. If you do, and like it,

write us. If you do not like it, do not fail to write us. Have you got any

interesting pictures ‘along the Color Line?’ Send them to us. In fact, help us

to help you and yours (3, emphasis in original).

The readers responded, and their letters filled the pages. The magazine had designated sections for their letters called “The Outer Pocket” and “The Letterbox.” From its earliest years, The

Crisis articulated the importance of its readers and, perhaps more than most magazines at the time, relied on its readership to accomplish its political and cultural goals.

Letters to the editor were a common genre in periodical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Popular and highbrow magazines, like Punch and The Little

Review, regularly published such letters. In scholarship, the rise of periodical studies has spotlighted forgotten or neglected genres, such as advertising, but letters to the editor have yet to receive the same critical scrutiny. Carey Snyder and Leif Sorensen (2018, 124) have started to draw attention to this important genre by showing how “modernist-era letters pages served as spaces both for debating pressing political and cultural topics and for readers to negotiate their relationship to a magazine and other readers.” Rather than cast readers as mere bystanders within

57 this network, these letters demonstrate the readers’ various activities in print culture. The letters show readers asking for specific content, debating literary values, and offering suggestions for future issues. The seriality of magazines allowed readers to assess, judge, and interrupt the gradual formation of cultural aesthetics.

Readers of The Crisis engaged with the magazine’s seriality in ways that resemble social activism. Anna Everett (2001, 6) describes such interactions as the “journalist-reader dynamic” common in the black press. This dynamic “was constituted generally by two-way messages that provided black readers more direct participation in public matters than was available via the major white presses at the time.” Readers’ letters constituted their own peculiar form of production. The letter to the editor was a genre that blurred the lines between producers and consumers and served as a crucial communicative medium for cultural creation. If, as Jane

Tompkins (1985, 10) argues in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,

“novels and stories…offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself” and, therefore, are worthy of study and examination, then readers’ letters about those same stories seem particularly apt for understanding literature as a social phenomenon. Letters to the editor offer new perspectives on literary and cultural analysis by providing historical evidence of readers’ responses; their reflections articulate the cultural significance of literature.

Readers of The Crisis, in particular, were concerned with the role literature played in reconstructing racial discourses, and they expressed an eagerness to do their part. Their letters align with Du Bois and the editorial team’s “specific strategy” of “using the arts to change white attitudes toward lynching” by “protesting degrading images in film and television and lobbying for more positive depictions” (Woodley 2014, 2). Readers often praised novels for portraying

58 characters entangled in the same social realities of their own lives. Furthermore, many hoped that progressive representations of race might improve their own lives over time.

These letters, I will argue, shaped editorial direction and, therefore, prompt a reconsideration of the readers’ roles in literary production. Pairing close and computational readings of serial publications illustrates how readers participated in magazine culture and understood literature as a social phenomenon. I will begin my analysis by close reading a key moment of readerly intervention within The Crisis—one that addresses the social responsibilities and consequences of authorial decisions. Both the author and reader discuss the literary, economic, and social stakes of writing and the significance of a text’s reception. While close reading prioritizes the nuances of each letter, it also presents the exchange as a static image that does not capture the seriality of magazines.

As a genre, the letter to the editor spans multiple issues and, therefore, calls for a mixed methodology that attends to both the immediate context of the letter and the ongoing conversations that surround it. Letters were written as a reflection of previous content and in anticipation of the next installment. After reading an issue, one reader might have sat under her electric light, thunderously typing out her irritation at last month’s literary selection. Another, perhaps, carefully creased the parchment of her handwritten letter so as not to smudge the ink or her praise for the editorial remarks in one of the popular Children’s Issues. These letters evoke a temporality that exceeds close reading as a method because they bridge past, present, and future issues, spreading out beyond the boundaries of any single text. Foregrounding letters asks us to consider what in the previous issues prompted a reader to write and wonder if publishing letters might have affected future issues.

59 To show how such exchanges between readers, authors, and editors unfolded over time, I will employ a common approach in digital humanities: topic modeling. Topic modeling is a computational process that assumes documents are composed of a set number of topics, which are made of words that regularly appear together. By summarizing the contents across many documents, this computational method shows that moments between readers and other contributors were not insulated and inconsequential events. Approaching letters from a different scale helps to situate them within larger patterns and makes visible the extent of readers’ participation. This computational approach draws from Lauren Klein’s (2013, 665) argument that techniques “from the fields of computational linguistics and data visualization help render visible the archival silences,” specifically those “implicit in our understanding of chattel slavery” but also in other source materials. Topic modeling reveals the readers of The Crisis, whose silence in literary criticism is particularly pronounced.

Folding this model back into a close reading of the magazine makes other moments of readerly presence more apparent. After topic modeling, I turn to another exchange between two writers (a poet and the chairman of the NAACP) that discuss and even credit readers for swaying editorial choices. Readers’ persuasiveness does not appear as a simple sequence of cause-and- effect. Rather, the community’s many letters seem to gradually inform editorial decisions and, in turn, shape magazine content. The aggregation of letters, like the collective voice of social protestors, could affect publication practices. Readers of The Crisis, then, participated in something akin to what Jessica Marie Johnson (2018, 58–59) calls “Black digital practice,” wherein “black subjects have themselves taken up science, data, and coding”—Du Bois famously so—in an attempt to mediate “their own black freedom dreams” and “hack their way

60 into systems (whether modernity, science, or the West), thus living where they were ‘never meant to survive.’” Readers of the early twentieth century engaged with serialized print culture in just this way and worked alongside editors and other contributors to rewrite America’s codes of race.

Ultimately, the letters to the editors in The Crisis, viewed through two scales of analysis, reveal two key aspects about readers. First, readers acknowledged that literature had the capacity to circulate both harmful and beneficial ideologies—and that readers were likely to adopt and imitate what they saw in art. Second, readers also had the power to intervene. Readers could influence artistic creation and the reconstruction of racial discourses. The literary field of

The Crisis was continuously changing. Letters to the editor serve as important markers of these changes. The readers entered into print culture with a sense of agency as they sought to alter social hierarchies through literature.

The Crisis Calls for Readerly Contribution

In the issue immediately following Du Bois’s call for participation, the magazine features an exchange between a reader and a writer; Henry E. Baker, an otherwise unknown reader, writes to Lloyd Osbourne, a well-known author at the time. Baker was the third African American to enter the US Naval Academy. Osbourne was the stepson of and collaborator with the famous author, Robert Louis Stevenson. In his letter, Baker critiques one of Osbourne’s protagonist in

The Kingdoms of the World, which was being serialized in Munsey’s Magazine at the time. He asks Osbourne to end the story with a progressive portrayal of the novel’s black protagonist,

Victor Daggancourt. The conversation between the two is emblematic of readerly engagement in the magazine. Baker’s intervention is possible within a serial medium, where feedback can occur

61 before the author concludes the novel. In other words, Baker seeks to intercept Osbourne’s plot.

Baker (1911, 26) opens his letter to Osbourne writing, “After reading the opening chapters of your interesting new serial…I find that they leave an unwelcome impression on my mind with reference to the picture you draw of Victor Daggancourt.” He continues,

“Daggancourt as a mere character in the literary world…may be plausible and even pleasing,” but “as a type of ‘better educated colored man,’…is not only a positive impossibility, but a harmful suggestion.” The “restraints placed around the educated colored man of older days,” which “tend[ed] to stifle his manhood and minimize his self-respect…certainly is not typically true of him to-day.” Furthermore, Baker continues, he would no longer “demean himself as to accept voluntarily the humiliating conditions upon which Daggancourt was allowed to remain.”

Baker criticizes Osbourne’s portrayal of Daggancourt, who has apparently endless patience to tolerate racism. Baker’s charge against Osbourne’s portrayal anticipates the expressions of race pride central to the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance. Additionally, Baker’s objection lays out the social stakes of black representation. He writes, “by no means the least of the obstacles to the progress of self-respecting colored men [is] that authors of note… persist consciously or unconsciously in holding these men up to public contempt and ridicule” (26).

Baker’s effort to intervene in Osbourne’s story, especially as it was still being published, suggests an attempt to influence an author with the hopes that his story might sway public thought.

For Baker, the readers of The Crisis, and elsewhere, the characterization of

Daggancourt encouraged racism by legitimizing it in fiction. These “influential writers in popular

62 magazines and newspapers,” Baker cautions, “daily shape public opinion” (26). With his letter,

Baker hopes to steer fiction away from black stereotyping and prevent the normalization of future racism. Within this understanding of literature and cultural work, then, tastemakers obtain a significant amount of cultural capital. Recognizing that tastemakers are capable of guiding public opinion, Baker seeks to sway Osbourne’s work and asks him to leverage his status as an influential writer.

Although Baker’s letter alone can only urge Osbourne to reconsider the representation of blackness in The Kingdoms of the World, his request nevertheless assumes some measure of cultural capital itself. The presence of Baker’s letter, regardless of its ultimate effect, signals as an act of readerly intervention. Scholars have shown that The Crisis sought to change the cultural portrayals of African American life in order to revise the racist mindset of most white Americans

(see Kirschke 2014; Williams 2014; Castronovo 2006). They, however, often locate this literary intervention primarily with the writers and producers. Baker’s complaint against Osbourne’s literary devices shows that readers, far from being mere consumers, played an integral role in this national literary and social effort.

Osbourne’s (1911, 27) response, published beside Baker’s letter in the same issue, defends his authorial stance as “emphatically on the side of the colored people in their hard progress forward.” Although he disagrees with Baker’s assessment that they are on “opposite sides of this question” regarding representation, he nevertheless agrees that the stakes of literary taste and the print market’s positive valuation are indeed demanding—only not in the way Baker had hoped.

“We novelists cannot make the public read us,” Osbourne writes, “if it throws down our book in

63 disgust we are done for; when we wish to go against prevailing prejudices and stupidities we need to do it as delicately as though treading on eggs.”

Osbourne’s response does not provide the socio-literary justice that Baker sought.

Rather, Osbourne defends his portrayal of Daggancourt as an attempt to “rouse in the reader a spark of [Baker’s] own resentment.” Furthermore, he believes, “[p]robably a million people read

Munsey’s Magazine, and here and there Daggancourt will make a friend. The picture of a more advanced, more educated, finer, higher type of colored man—in the present truly deplorable state of public feeling—would make enemies” (emphasis in original). Osbourne imagines the logic of the cultural marketplace as one of small investment and gradual accretion. A more progressive approach might backfire, thereby undoing his (self-proclaimed) social activism and economic gain. He believes that his work will sway the minds of some (white) readers, and these sympathetic “friends” will increase over time and promote social change. Ultimately, however,

Osbourne expresses an unwillingness to test the dominant logic of race that governs cultural capital.

Baker and Osbourne’s exchange represents one possible encounter between author and reader. Their correspondence is emblematic of readers joining the games of serialized culture— one in which the magazine brokered the interests of readers and authors alike. Baker’s letter carries his aspirations to change an author’s portrayal of a black man, which he hopes might carry over into reality as white readers empathize with and admire Daggancourt.

Baker’s letter has two key implications for literary studies. First, he directly addresses the literary decisions of Osbourne’s work, imagining literature to be partly responsible for normalizing and (with crucial revisions) dismantling social hierarchies. Additionally, Baker’s

64 letter complicates conventional notions of the reader in print culture. Relationships between readers and the various processes of reading itself has been difficult to postulate. Deidre Shauna

Lynch and Evelyne Ender (2018, 1073–1082) outline the numerous hinderances to recovering the activities and thoughts of historical readers. Due to the archival limitations and historical impossibilities of recuperation, readers’ reactions have been tacitly assumed to be private or at least localized. In other words, readers are often implicitly considered passive and acquiescent to authorial production. Cultural studies, then, tend to inherit a classical model of production that assumes a top-down binary of producers and consumers.

But, a host of scholars as well as digitization projects have been changing the landscape of literary and cultural studies (see McHenry 2002; Foster 2005; Gardner 2015). Texts once considered peripheral and marginal are now moving to the center. Communities of readers have begun to surface and have taken on new importance within the environment of cultural production. Reading practices and readers’ thoughts—like all history—can only be impartial at best. Letters to the editors published in magazines, however, offer textual evidence of reader activities. Baker and Osbourne’s exchange provides another entry point into understanding literature’s “cultural work,” to borrow Tompkins’s phrase. More specifically, Baker’s attempt to contest white supremacy through literature elucidates the accessibility that the modern and mass- produced magazines could grant. As a reader, Baker assumes some agency in writing to

Osbourne.

Baker and Osbourne’s correspondence is remarkable because it records a reader’s reception of an author’s work, which is in relatively short supply in literary studies. Their correspondence displays the various expectations of readers in not only what they hoped to read,

65 but also how they sought to inform authors of those expectations. Within the magazine space, readers had certain access to authors and could fiddle with the gears of literary production.

Deep Structures of Readerly Influence

Baker and Osbourne’s exchange—while significant by itself—does not indicate the full extent of exchanges between readers, editors, and authors. Could Baker’s or other readers’ letters actually shape editorial decisions? More generally, how was a magazine dedicated to changing the racial social structures of America able to change literary output within its own pages? Do readers’ voices have any sway within seriality?

Answering such questions must go beyond any single exchange of letters and requires engaging with the serial nature of magazines. The open-ended state of periodicals, as Hannah

McGregor (2014, 250) notes, “challenge[s] familiar critical modes of reading,” because magazines exhibit a “the complex interplay of seriality and hypermediacy.” Series of ongoing, published conversations create a continuity that stretches out beyond a single text’s conventional boundaries. Letters to the editor serve as readerly updates that stitch together consecutive points within these conversations. Due to the magazines’ seriality, it is necessary to develop literary methods that are sensitive to serial publishing, which are “predicated on not ending,” unlike printed books (Mussell 2015, 345).

Emerging methodologies that attend to the serialized textuality of magazines are necessary to articulate the relationships between readers, editors, and authors. As Matthew

Jockers (2013, 156) argues, “Attempts to demonstrate literary imitation, intertextuality, and influence have relied almost entirely on close reading.” Close reading falls short of explaining influence in a serialized medium due to its primary concentration on the text itself. The intense

66 focus of close reading closes off the responsiveness or emergent2 qualities of texts from a larger survey of literary culture. Computational methods, on the other hand, help to track the relationship between serialized content and letters. Machine reading, unlike close reading, derives meaning from the interrelationships formed when many texts appear as data points.

Shifting the frame of analysis from close reading to computational analysis helps to situate the significance of letters to the editor. More specifically, employing computational methods takes up the social and literary dynamics of letters and considers how they interact with other genres over time. Merging a computational approach to a close reading of Baker’s and Osbourne’s letters begins to unfold contours, textures, and depth to the readerly actions hosted within the magazine.

One way to conceptualize many documents at a large scale is to reduce them to the subjects they discuss, which is the goal of topic modeling. Topic modeling can be imagined as a two-step reading process. First, the machine reads all the texts in a corpus, searching for topics.

Topics are words that frequently appear together. Next, the machine reads the corpus again this time assigning topics to each document.3 The result is a rough summation of what each text is about. David Blei (2012) explains topic modeling as a process that “takes a collection of texts as

2 Sean Latham (2017) describes magazines as exhibiting emergence, a term borrowed from new media studies. Magazines provide multiple, non-linear pathways to read its text. Each pathway generates new meaning as different texts within a single issue can inflect the interpretations of other texts. This emergent quality multiplies with each subsequent issue.

3 Topic modeling is a predictive algorithm, and so the process will create slightly different models each time. In a well-fitted model, the resulting variations will be minimal.

67 input” and “discovers a set of ‘topics’—recurring themes that are discussed in the collection— and the degree to which each document exhibits those topics.”4

In order to computationally analyze the materials within The Crisis, I first extract its data from the Modernist Journals Project (MJP). The MJP is an online repository of early twentieth century magazines, including The Crisis. The project provides structured data of these magazines, meaning that the textual contents are encoded with metadata. The metadata provides a way to associate extracted words with bibliographic information, such as what genre those words appear in, the date the issue was published, and other information. Training a topic model on the majority of the MJP (the portion with structured data) provides a more accurate picture of what topics appeared in The Crisis.5 Topic modeling the MJP offers a way to understand individual letters within the larger ecology of print culture and provides the necessary data for approximating their interconnectedness to other genres.

Topic modeling the MJP returns a list of familiar themes central to early twentieth century magazines. The Crisis, for example, draws heavily from topic 30: “negro white people men man negroes race south black crisis american.” The string of words here represents how the model imagines a topic. The first word is the highest ranked word, meaning it is a strong signal for this particular topic. Other topics about World War I (“war people germany peace german country american russia”) and gender (“women woman man men sex marriage”) are also recognizable. Each document contains every topic within the model, but topics vary according to

4 For articles on topic modeling, see Lisa M. Rhody (2012), Benjamin M. Schmidt (2012), and Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood (2012).

5 Many projects and articles have computationally explored issues with the MJP’s data and modernist literature (see Drouin, 2014; Hoyt Long and Richard So, 2016; Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan, 2016)

68 concentration. The model reads one document (a set of letters from the December 1910 issue of

The Crisis) as predominantly about race, or, in the model’s terms, 27% about topic 30. Other topics are considered less relevant and appear in descending proportions. That same document includes trace amounts (.0001%) of the James Joyce-Ulysses topic (“mr says bloom review martin dedalus”). The ratio of topics that compose each document provides a simplistic but effective profile of what that document is about. Although these topics provide a descriptive overview of documents within the MJP, they do not yet explain the relationships between letters, fiction, articles, and other genres.

By comparing topic ratios between documents, we can begin to understand how genres fluctuate over time (whether they adopt new topics or drop old ones) and whether some genres became more or less like others in terms of content. Cosine similarity effectively does this task for datasets like a topic model. Instead of focusing on a single, prevalent topic, cosine similarity measures the entire mixture of topics within a document and compares that mixture (or vector) to other documents, resulting in a simple scale (zero to one) of document similarity. Scott Weingart

(2012) argues that the cosine similarity of topic ratios better reflects textual similarity than extracting the rise and fall of a single topic across documents. Andrew Piper (2018, 69) describes the attention to all topics within a document as “reading topologically,” where instead of defining documents as predominately about a topic, this method retains a sense that topics “reside across all documents in different states of likelihood.” Topic modeling, then, can move beyond descriptions of documents and allow “us to see how ideas cohere, but also fade away.” The changing distributions of topics in documents (the way they merge and blur over time) provides a revealing signal of cultural change, and, as Ted Underwood (2018, 1) argues, effectively serve

69 “as a proxy for human judgments about social difference.” Tracking the similarities of genres as they change illuminates their fluctuations and hybridity. This method highlights the cohesion and gravitational pull of some genres within the magazine, such as letters and fiction.

Measuring the cosine similarity of documents within the topic model draws out the significance of letters to the editor as a genre, highlighting its presence and its relationships to other genres.

Genre Change within The Crisis

fiction

1.00

0.75

Genre Index advertisements articles 0.50 fiction Similarity letters poetry

0.25

0.00

1912 1914 1916 Year

Figure 1. Visualization of the“fiction” genre’s similarity to other genres in The Crisis, 1911–

1917. In 1913, “articles,” “letters,” and “poetry” become more similar to “fiction,” before

70 separating again. The scale, zero to one, indicates the degree of dissimilarity or similarity, respectively.

Figure 1 visualizes the rise and fall of genre similarities from the perspective of the “fiction” genre. At the very top of the graph is the “fiction” genre, which perfectly matches itself and provides an anchored point from which to measure its likeness to other genres published each year along the x-axis. The other lines indicate fiction’s similarity to other genres. The three lines in the middle (“poetry,” “articles,” and “letters”) suggest that the similarity of fiction to other genres gradually increased, which is indicated in the upward slope of each line, before falling.

This graph starts to articulate the dynamic nature of genres in serialized print culture by showing the fluctuations of genres. Over time, texts could mimic other texts by borrowing their language or differentiate themselves by using different words.

From this zoomed out view, Figure 1 shows the rising similarities between fiction, letters, and other genres from 1911–1913 and provides a different perspective to understand and situate Baker and Osbourne’s correspondence. Examining the topic ratios within these genres explains why they became more similar and helps to align the model with Baker’s call for progressive representation. The top ten topics in “fiction” in both years share many similarities that relate to descriptive and narratological language (“said back man eyes face looked saw”). In

1913, however, the race topic (topic 30) emerges in the top ten list for “fiction” (“negro white people men man negroes race”). This topic becomes a significant portion of “fiction” where it previously only appeared in diluted concentrations. The Crisis, of course, published fictional

71 works about race from the start. But, the growing prevalence of this topic in fiction suggests that the works of 1913 discussed race using more explicit terms at higher frequencies.

A passage from “The Man Who Won” (1913, 293) by Harry H. Pace illustrates one example of a fictional work with a relatively high concentration of the race topic:

“Consequently the keeper was puzzled. Wyatt was a Negro, one of the

biggest cotton planters in the State, owned ten square miles of land and had

an army of tenants, croppers and workmen surrounding him. He was openly

admired and respected by the blacks of the entire district, and secretly envied

and feared by a large portion of the whites. But he kept a cool head, raised

more cotton than anybody else, had the finest stock, paid his bills promptly,

and his credit was gilt edged.”

While this passage might not seem remarkable through the lens of close reading, especially in

The Crisis, the model indicates that the diction and topic composition of this passage departed from the genre norms set two years before. Topic modeling helps to disambiguate the varied and subtle ways authors depict race through fiction and how the reconfigurations of topics visibly reshaped the genre. Coincidentally, this passage also resonates with Baker’s letter when he hopes

Osbourne’s black and white characters “may be made to tie up to each other…on terms of equal commercial advantage and mutual personal respect” (1911, 26). This topic’s significance, especially in increasing the similarities between genres, is also apparent after 1913. As “letters” and “fiction” lose some similarity, the race topic declines in “fiction” until it disappears from the top ten topics by 1914. The gradual convergence of fiction with other genres, then, seems to be driven by this topic.

72 The letters themselves, however, are not the only genre to share similarities with fiction, and, therefore, other genres could be significant factors in re-shaping fiction. The

“articles” and “poetry” genres also participate in an increase of genre similarity in 1913. Looking at the similarities of “articles” and “letters” reveals more about the entangled nature of textuality in serialized print culture.

Figure 2. Visualization of the similarities of “articles” and “letters” to other genres in The Crisis,

1911–1917. Articles and letters share a high degree of similarity.

73 In Figure 2, the similarities of genres between “articles” (on the left) and “letters” (on the right) become immediately clear. “Articles” and “letters” share a high degree of similarity every year

(they appear high up on the y-axis), indicating a tight coherence between the two genres. Articles and letters responded to each other and formed a pattern of communication during The Crisis’s early years. By visualizing the close relationship between letters and articles, these twin-like graphs reinforce the apparent conversational dimension of serialized print culture as writers, readers, and editors could easily share their thoughts (see Churchill and McKible 2005, 1–2).

Additionally, the similarity of “fiction” to both “letters” and “articles” follows the same trajectory, further suggesting that the changes in “fiction” correlate to language found in these two genres.

The three graphs illustrate the changing writing habits in periodical culture. The convergence and divergence of genres here indicate a responsive relationship between various actors in the magazine. Editors, writers, and readers borrowed each other’s ways of discussing topics. As they picked up and adapted the language of others, they were simultaneously aggregating and developing a literary taste within The Crisis.

Although these three graphs visualize the exchanges between genres, they also raise questions about editorial control and reader engagement. Do these changing similarities reflect a responsive community of readers and writers carefully attuned to each other’s interests? Or, do they reveal a strong editorial hand who capably creates coherence through a selection process?

While the editors’ influence cannot be ruled out, especially because they had the final word in the assembly of each issue, there are clues that suggest their decisions were adaptive to other contributors within the magazine.

74 The topic model again helps to determine who drew from the race topic most frequently, thereby establishing a semantic provenance of explicit race discussions across genres.

Figure 3. Comparison of the race topic (“negro white people men man negroes race”) across four genres shows the race topic was most prevalent in “letters.”

Figure 3 indicates that “letters” (bottom left) most frequently discussed race using the key words of the topic when compared to other genres. Although “articles” ranks second in this regard, the race topic diminishes with each year of publication. “Letters,” on the other hand, regularly contain language of this specific topic. It seems, then, that the readers’ letters—perhaps more so

75 than articles, which included editorials and outside contributions—played an important role in promoting this language. “Letters” in The Crisis become more central to the magazine from topic modeling’s perspective because this topic was a significant factor in increasing the similarities between “fiction,” “articles,” and “letters.” This topic’s persistent presence in readers’ letters, and its eventual emergence in fiction, suggests the readers provided one major source for works that adopted a similar language.

While the editors are ultimately responsible for selecting each piece for publication, other moments show that the editors’ selections adapted to ongoing events, which was typical for a newsletter. Baker and Osbourne’s exchange, for example, shows an editorial deftness to include new materials as situations develop. Osbourne’s novel first appeared in Munsey’s (January 1911,

505). The Crisis published Baker and Osbourne’s letters two months later in March. Anne Carroll

(2004, 94) similarly tracks how The Crisis published reprints from other periodicals as a way to establish credibility amongst skeptical readers, further highlighting the editorial staff’s quick turnaround and responsivity. The ability to publish news reports in near synchronicity with other publishers showcases an editorial agility. While the editors undoubtedly planned to publish some works in advance, there was space in The Crisis for ad hoc inclusions.

Regardless of the editorializing of The Crisis, topic modeling elucidates the responsivity of the magazine’s various actors. If the editors were highly selective in order to produce coherence, then it seems that readers continued to interact with those selections, establishing a positive feedback. The readers’ continued participation, therefore, reinforced the editorial decisions. The Crisis wanted to amplify discussions about race on a national scale, and

76 the readers’ letters responded positively to that call. Rather than emphasizing one group’s perspective over another, topic modeling helps to re-stage the multivocality of magazines.

Topic modeling these letters begins to organize what Linda Hughes (1989, 119) describes as the “deep structure of order combined with unpredictability” that is present in periodicals. Hughes acknowledges that periodicals appear to be very orderly: they have formatted sections, often labeled and printed in the same sequential order each month. But, the content of each issue changes regularly—new writers and new ideas shuttle in and out.

Subscribers had a general sense of what to expect in each issue (order) but could not predict the exact contents (unpredictability). Matthew Philpotts (2015, 406) similarly sees periodicals as

“characterized by apparently contradictory properties: newness and familiarity, openness and closure, diversity and consistency.”6 While letters like Baker’s and Osbourne’s show explicit attempts at influencing literary production, topic modeling offers a mode of exploring the deeper, submerged structures of readerly interaction. Baker and Osbourne’s letters read differently now that they are situated within the topic model. Their exchange becomes one of many letters that landed on the desks at The Crisis—letters sorted by various workers, discussed by staff, and then finally formatted for print. While close reading privileges the nuanced arguments of each letter, topic modeling foregrounds the quantity of readerly activities. Combining close and computational readings links the particulars of each letter within the larger system of print culture.

6 Hughes’s and Philpott’s articles consider the possible benefits of thinking about periodicals in terms of chaos theory. While I found their language to be helpful and precise—and their argument worth further contemplation—I felt that introducing chaos theory as a metaphorical extension would be beyond the scope of this article.

77 The aggregated responses of readers were a significant part of the literary landscape of

The Crisis. Despite the complexities and sometimes impossibilities of ascertaining literary influence on a broad scale, Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers (2016, 21) offer a useful reminder of intentionality when considering historical agents: “literary history is not a blank canvas that acquires historical self-consciousness only when retrospective observers touch a brush to it. It’s already full of historical observers.” The readers and editors of The Crisis—as with any civil rights group—were keen historical observers, who actively intervened in the ongoing maintenance of literary taste and hoped to correct the dominant culture’s all too frequent racist tendencies.

Baker’s letter to Osbourne presents the reader-author connection as a direct line and stages a conversation as though authors were adaptable to readers’ wishes. Baker had hoped to intervene in the writing of Osbourne’s novel knowing that “influential writers in popular magazines and newspapers daily shape public opinion” (26). Baker imagined that his argument might intercept Osbourne’s work, influence his plot, and by extension influence the public opinions that Osbourne’s work would eventually shape. In this sense, he imagined that access to an author’s writing process was not only possible, but also capable of making critical social interventions. Osbourne argues that he is also interested in pleasing an audience and changing their opinions on race eventually. Topic modeling these genres shows how Baker’s letter, aggregated with other letters, formed a readerly presence that percolates throughout this vast print network and indeed managed to shape literary, or at least editorial, production.

78 The Cost of Cultural Capital

Although Baker’s letter and the topic model show how some forms of readerly influence took shape in The Crisis, it remains unclear how the historical readers themselves—or contemporary critics—might have perceived this persuasion at work. The topic model discerns patterns in a mode wholly unlike human reading. Close reading and topic modeling address different levels of textuality and, together, trace out readerly participation in the magazines. But, what signals or clues, could the readers detect? How might it be possible to fold Baker and

Osbourne’s letters and the topic model back into the seriality of The Crisis? Returning to the text magnifies the readers’ presence. Editors and writers who made passing references to readers, which previously might have been inconsequential, now obtain new significance.

Six years after Baker and Osbourne’s exchange—six years of readers writing to the editors—another pair of letters picks up the conversation of authorial responsibilities to the audience. In the January 1917 issue, poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay writes to J. E. Spingarn asking why his poems had “been denounced by the colored people for reasons [he could not] fathom” (113–114). At this time, Spingarn was the chairman of the NAACP and Lindsay’s acclaim as a poet had been growing; however, in more recent issues of The Crisis, Lindsay’s poetry fell under heavy criticism from editors and (supposedly) readers. In Spingarn and

Lindsay’s correspondence the presence of the readers comes into view again as a possibly real or a rhetorically convenient excuse for the fall of Lindsay’s status in The Crisis.

Lindsay’s reputation as an important American poet grew quickly but was short-lived.

At the inaugural banquet of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse (1912), Lindsay had impressed W. B.

79 Yeats with his recitation of “Congo” (Engler 1982, 29). Harriet Monroe (1924, 93), editor of

Poetry, recalled Lindsay as,

a modern knight-errant, the Don Quixote of our so-called unbelieving,

unromantic age…whose whimsical imagination, even as the madder fancy of

Cervantes’ hero, cuts the light into seven colors like a prism, so that facts

become glamorous before our eyes.

His fame, however, dwindled, and he drew little attention by the 1920s.

Lindsay, though, had first acquired some critical acclaim in The Crisis before the magazine’s readers supposedly rejected his work. Lindsay’s story, “The Golden-Faced People: A

Story of the Chinese Conquest of America,” was a featured piece in the November 1914 issue. In the following issue, “Congo” was given a short, promotional blurb (December 1914, 59). In the

May 1915, Du Bois tentatively praised Lindsay’s poem in the “Opinion” section (18). Du Bois wrote, “Colored readers may be repelled at first at Lindsay’s great poem but it is, in its spirit, a splendid tribute with all its imperfections of spiritual insight” (1915, 18). Du Bois’s brief note then introduces another published letter from Lindsay, in which Lindsay explains his poetical process. Du Bois’s remarks, at the time, validate Lindsay’s work despite its flaws.

In his letter, Lindsay describes the series of moments that inspired his poem. “Congo,

Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo,” he writes, “The word began to haunt. It echoed with the war drums and cannibal yells of Africa. It seemed the perfection of tone color” (quoted in Du

Bois 1915, 18). Lindsay lists the various writers that influenced his poetry, including Joseph

Conrad and Du Bois, both of whom helped to create the “jungle impression” that shaped his poetry (19). Du Bois’s praise for Lindsay’s poem seems oddly incongruent compared to his

80 disapproval of stereotyping in other works, such as Carl van Vechten’s notorious novel.

Lindsay’s and van Vechten’s works share a primitivism that Du Bois would ultimately reject.

Within The Crisis, however, Du Bois seems willing to overlook Lindsay’s use of primitivism.

In the same issue, Du Bois’s praise of Lindsay is immediately followed by a collection of negative reviews of The Birth of a Nation. These reviews specifically condemn D. W.

Griffith’s representation of blackness: “The producer seems to have followed the principle of gathering the most vicious and grotesque individuals he could find among the colored people, and showing them as representatives of the truths of the entire race” (W. E. B. Du Bois, “Tom

Dixon’s ‘Clansman,’” The Crisis, May 1915, 19). These negative reviews are not surprising; the magazine’s condemnation of Birth, however, juxtaposes Du Bois’s earlier praise of Lindsay. Du

Bois’s praise of Lindsay’s “great poem” has the effect of affixing even more validation because of its contrast with the negative reviews of Birth. The side-by-side comparison of Du Bois’s reviews of Lindsay and Griffith suggests that the editor would not hesitate to criticize Lindsay in the same way unless he found some redeeming qualities.

Despite their initial praise and support, The Crisis and Du Bois eventually adjusted their appraisal of Lindsay’s poems a year later. In the August 1916 issue, the literary review section of the magazine, “The Looking Glass,” heavily criticizes Lindsay’s two poems in terms similar to the denunciation of Birth. It states, “Mr. Vachel Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts” (182). Similar to Du Bois’s earlier piece, this review also admits that

Lindsay’s poetry displays “defects as well as his genius” and also includes excerpts from the poems and Lindsay’s own explanation of his poetic process. But, the review ends with a damning

81 reflection that Lindsay’s work is “well meant, but some of it nonsense” and that he “knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.” The critiques in this later review align more closely with Du Bois’s literary resistance to primitivism and echoes the earlier critique of Birth. The magazine’s reversal highlights the tentative state of taste in magazines. Magazines can quickly withdraw their cultural investment when an author, even one on the rise, fails the schemes of their literary taste.

Although the tangle of influences and pressures that led to Lindsay’s literary downfall is obscure, Lindsay and Spingarn place responsibility on the readers in their 1917 exchange. It could be the case that the popularity of Birth outside the magazine forced the editors to reconsider their earlier assessment of Lindsay’s work; the national praise of Griffith’s racist film compelled the editors to re-evaluate texts with primitivist portrayals. Perhaps, Du Bois was able to separate the two in his initial review because the social effects of Griffith’s movie had not taken hold yet. Nevertheless, whether real or imagined, there was an accepted rhetorical agreement between Lindsay and Spingarn that readers may have pressured editorial decisions.

Lindsay and Spingarn mutually assign responsibility for the magazine’s editorial pivot to the “people.” Lindsay (January 1917, 113) assumes those who have rebuked his writing “have not taken the trouble to read” his works, and yet their opinion is able to sway cultural capital and undo his status within The Crisis. Similarly, Spingarn cites the influence of readers:

“No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your

understanding of their hopes... How can we fail to be grateful for all this

beauty? But somehow we feel (and I say ‘we’ because in this I share the

82 feelings of the colored race), somehow we feel that you do not write about

colored humanity as you write about white humanity” (114).

Spingarn switches from reporting the tastes of the readers–“many of them”–to sharing and adopting their concerns as his own. Furthermore, although not an editor himself, Spingarn’s “we” resonates with an editorial “we,” one which Spingarn has just extended to include the readers.

The exchange between Lindsay and Spingarn magnifies the readers’ presence and the ways writers imagined and encountered them in the magazine. Lindsay and Spingarn’s exchange is not the same as a reader writing to an author, as Baker wrote to Osbourne; rather, the two writers in this case are relatively well-established figures. Significantly, both explicitly evoke the impact of readers in determining taste. While Osbourne feared that he might lose his audience if he adjusted his writing to Baker’s requests, Lindsay has seemingly lost his status by failing to write to the readers’ tastes. Both Spingarn and Lindsay frame Lindsay’s downfall on “the readers.” The rejection of Lindsay’s work becomes framed within the idea of readerly agency.

The readers, even if only in the imaginations of writers and organizers, was a powerful factor in the determination of taste and cultural values. The topic model reinforces the realities of readerly influence, however, and provides some evidence when Lindsay and Spingarn evoke readerly pressures.

The arrayed and diverse letters in The Crisis attest to the editors’ vision of a publication partly molded by a community of readers. Du Bois and others undoubtedly had specific agendas they hoped to accomplish with The Crisis. Most readers praised the magazine’s efforts to change American race relations and did not expect the magazine to ever veer off its specific course too drastically. Nevertheless, the exchange of letters between Spingarn and

83 Lindsay draws attention to reader activities. Furthermore, the conversation between Spingarn and

Lindsay illuminates the prominence of readers in the literary field, suggesting that their opinions reverberated throughout culture. The inclusion of letters and the frequent mention of readers serves as a public performance of readership not found in printed books. The serialization of the magazine enables more immediate interactions and feedback. By attending to the activities of readers in serialized print culture, we can begin to see more clearly the various real and imagined mechanisms that maintained or dismantled literary taste.

Conclusion

It is not surprising that The Crisis sought to reconfigure cultural taste in alignment with social reform efforts. But, the widespread and active presence of readers within this project suggests a need to further explore the role of readers in shaping literary taste. The magazine indeed blurred the boundaries of producer and consumer in the literary marketplace of the early twentieth century, and readers worked as integral actors, going beyond their powers as purchasers, in the recalibration of literary taste.

By opening up the circuits between readers, editors, and writers, The Crisis aimed to link the social activism of the NAACP branches with the field of cultural production. This enhanced connectivity facilitated the broad endeavors to change the dominant logic of race in America.

The editorial staff, Henry Baker, and many readers expressed their acute awareness of the latent social power within literary portrayals. Many hoped that positive representations of blackness would activate new social possibilities and took to print to see that change enacted.

For The Crisis, then, establishing itself and its readers as tastemakers could go a significant way towards restructuring literary and, ultimately, social norms. Attaining status in

84 the cultural field included the capacity to rewrite social codes in other fields. The Crisis leveraged a new and diverse readership to populate the field of cultural production with voices that sought social change.

As computational efforts help to organize more and more texts, a picture of The

Crisis’s cultural efforts perhaps calls for more accounts of the readers who contributed their thoughts to the magazine. In order to recover the readers who practiced this social reform in their literary criticism, new methods can be implemented that were not previously available.

Oscillating between close and computational methods makes the readers’ influence visible. As computational methods continue to bring old texts to new light, both scales of analysis will be needed to understand the changing, fluid nature of serialized print culture. The Crisis provided a platform and sustained active dialogue with its readers in an attempt to maximize its ability to change cultural taste and, therefore, the dominant logic of race.

The Crisis advertised its circulation rates early and often, making clear that its success was its readers. As much as the magazine highlighted each wave of socially conscientious literature, it recognized its readers as the undertow that generated the force of the wave. The

Crisis facilitated readers in literary criticism by promoting their arguments for progressive literature. Henry Baker and other readers of The Crisis did not wait for literature to reflect their interests. Instead, they actively persuaded authors and editors through their own writing. The gossamer threads of readerly influence that spread out and run through The Crisis shaped the literary values and social attitudes that would become integral to the Harlem Renaissance.

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90 Combative Collaboration: Readers in the Cultural Field of The Little Review

“I enclose a subscription to The Little Review. Not because it is worth it. You know it is not.”

—H. R. Trinidad, Colorado.

“The much bepraised Joyce's ‘Ulysses’ is punk, Lewis' ‘Imaginary Letters’ are punkier and Ezra

Pound is punkiest.”

—Frank Stuhlman, Vernon, N.Y.

Introduction

Readers of The Little Review (1914–1929) had an affinity for the controversial. The magazine began as bold literary and social review that regularly featured avant-garde literature and supported radical political movements, namely socialism and anarchism1. Although the magazine was tailored to a relatively small group of subscribers, it obtained federal attention on several occasions. The first occurred when Margaret Anderson, the founder and editor, suggested that “some one shoot the governor of Utah” and “start the Revolution” (“Toward Revolution,” 5).

Her editorial was in response to the execution of Joe Hillstrom, a member of Industrial Workers of the World, and prompted an FBI investigation into The Little Review’s offices. Perhaps better known in literary studies, however, is the magazine’s court battle over the publication of James

Joyce’s “Nausicaa” episode from Ulysses. The Society for the Suppression of Vice charged The

Little Review with obscenity, forcing Anderson to discontinue the serialization of Ulysses. These and similar events helped develop The Little Review’s significant and notorious legacy in modernist studies.

Of the many shocking moments in The Little Review’s fifteen-year run, however, one stands out as perhaps the most peculiar: the September 1916 “Blank Issue.” After two years of

91 publishing, Anderson released this issue with these words printed on the first page: “The Little

Review hopes to become a magazine of Art. The September issue is offered as a ‘Want Ad.’”

Then, the following page states, “...‘The other pages will be left blank.’” The next eleven pages were intentionally left blank. The only content within the magazine was a few editorial pieces, including a series of cartoons illustrating Anderson using her free time with which she practices piano for eighteen hours, converts the “sheriff to anarchism and vers libre,” suffers “for humanity at Emma Goldman’s lectures,” and swims (14–15). The issue ends with a few featured letters. The next issue of the magazine did not appear until two months later in November.

Figure 1. Image of The Blank Issue, The Little Review, September 1916.

92 The Blank Issue sparked arguments about art and society within the magazine’s community of readers and writers. The sustained debates that carry on well after the Blank Issue created a state of combative collaboration in The Little Review. Disapproving readers continued to subscribe to the magazine while challenging its new format. Anderson, Heap, and eventually

Ezra Pound forged ahead with their new literary program, offering some instructions on the values of their new artistic regime but little patience for dissent. Editors and readers frequently collided in the “Reader Critic” section of the magazine. Rather than stunting the growth of the magazine, the antagonistic presence of many readers in The Little Review became a generative force in the evolution of the magazine’s cultural field. Readers, editors, and authors competed with each other in order to define the value of art and the magazine’s literary taste. As such, the

Blank Issue records a unique moment in print culture, one that highlights the centrality of readers in literary production and the evolution of a cultural field. Readers were not only involved in the aftermath of the Blank Issue, but also in the dynamic and emergent qualities of a cultural field when it transforms.

As Jayne Marek points out in Women Editing Modernism, the Blank Issue is “a superb example of avant garde insouciance,” and the magazine aligns with familiar High Modernist attributes and characteristics: elitism, shock value, and sardonic humor (80). Marek points out that The Little Review typifies canonical narratives of High Modernism’s art-for-art’s sake, often because criticism has tended to magnify Ezra Pound’s involvement in the editorial process. The magazine came to epitomize “the glorification of the individual artist/genius” in scholarly circles

(McKible, 81).

93 Scholarly criticism has challenged the magazine’s claims of art-for-art’s sake, reading ideology back into the apolitical practices of the editors. In Anarchy and Culture: The Politics of

Modernism, David Weir locates Anderson’s early editorial practices at the intersection of political anarchism and experimental art forms, both of which “move in the same direction but on different planes.” Mark Gaipa and Sean Latham similarly read the Blank Issue as a

“supremely anarchistic gesture” inspired by Anderson and Jane Heap’s (the magazine’s co- editor) time in California (xiii). Both groups (anarchists and modernists), however, were not able to sustain their “earlier alliances” and their “parallel concerns of politics and culture began to separate” (157). Although Weir does not discuss the Blank Issue directly, the empty pages can be read as the final anarchistic gesture, which also creates a vacuum between the magazine’s early anarchistic days and later avant-garde days.

Others have read the magazine within the context of commercialism, a field frequently posed as anathema to High Modernism. In The Public Face of Modernism, Mark Morrisson shows how American modernism emerged and became entangled with “commercial mass culture” (134). The Little Review, in particular, “turned to the energies of a vibrant advertising culture to help bring modernism into the public sphere.” Despite “modernism’s rhetorical lack of concern for audiences,” the editors were intensely invested in augmenting the circulation of the magazine (135). Although Morrisson does not mention the Blank Issue directly, Anderson’s depiction of the issue as a “Want Ad” resonates with his argument.

Once the advertising tactics lured in new readers, Anderson and Heap maintained regular correspondences with them. They cultivated this interactivity through their responses to their readers and to their own comments, both ensuring “the sense of conversation in the

94 magazine but also insist[ing] that the Little Review serve as a forum for new and radical ideas engaging authors, critics, and audience in the kinds of debate necessary for vitality of the mind” (Marek, 82). The Blank Issue, however, agitated the conversational nature of the magazine by inviting antagonism from its audience.

The Blank Issue broke the expected and familiar operations of magazine production and prompted a re-evaluation of the magazine’s goals. While Anderson sought to move the magazine towards esoteric and aesthetically complicated high-brow art, many readers expressed their desire for socially-aware art. The Blank Issue reveals a rift between the interests of readers and editors: the editors suddenly disapproved of their selections, which they had originally developed with their readers. By disapproving of the magazine’s past, the editors also abandoned the project that initially drew readers to their magazine. Curiously, though, this schism did not cause the magazine to lose its audience and collapse as might be expected. Instead, the issue sparked heated debates between readers and editors that continued in the following issues and volumes. The discussions within the magazine reveal two key factors of literary production in the magazines: taste was continually contested, and readers could negotiate in determining and setting the value of the magazine’s taste.

Reader Responses to the Blank Issue

The Blank Issue set off a re-evaluation of the magazine’s place within the literary field.

It announced the editors’ intentions to reset the schema of taste that had informed their previous decisions. Not all readers agreed with the change, however. Many found The Little Review’s new direction both obnoxiously difficult and meaningless. Alan Adair, a soldier reading the magazine from the Fovant Camp in England during World War One, considered the magazine’s

95 reconstruction to be a “tower of Babel” and “contemptible” (21). Many other disgruntled readers shared Adair’s estimation and filled the Reader Critic section with their complaints.

Readers often criticized and disagreed with the authors and editors. Their disapproval of the magazine were frequently aired and often part of the magazine’s showcase. It was not uncommon for other magazines to publish the occasional letter of dissent from readers, but why did The Little Review highlight their large, discontented audience? Did they enjoy irritating readers who “didn’t” get “Art”? Was there a certain, unspoken playfulness about disagreeing so intensely about art?

One reader, “H. L. C.,” acknowledges that, despite the editors’ poor choices, the

Reader Critic section of each issue “at least is always interesting” and that “no one ever seems to be safe from [the editors]” (33). Although they undoubtedly initiated a contest over taste with the

Blank Issue, the editors folded the readers’ criticisms back into the magazine, thus establishing the readers’ role in the production of literature. The readers’ feedback, then, became one angle of force that directed the magazine’s trajectory.

The most common complaint against the magazine after the Blank Issue was that the magazine had abandoned its social and political interests. Louis Puteklis, a reader who appears a few times in the Reader Critic, asks the editors, “What is your definition of art? You say: ‘Art for

Art’s sake,” but “that is only a phrase” (25). The editors provide the motto, he argues, but not an explanation: “Why is there no encouraging editorial on Art? Thirteen empty pages and not a word from the pen of the Art-sick Editor? Why was not the whole magazine a blank, or is only half of it to be devoted to art?” Grasping at some understanding for the magazine’s sudden shift,

Puteklis’s letter leads him to his ultimate question: “for whom is The Little Review published?

96 For artists only, or for all people” (26). Puteklis’s vision of literature is inseparable from the social dimensions of writing. Whether “progressive or retrogressive,” he argues, “[t]here can be no art without social vision, and without definite ideas.” Puteklis’s letter articulates the same social concerns found in other letters to The Little Review. Many convey a similar sense of loss and abandonment.

Many readers called for The Little Review to return to the blend of social review and literature that Anderson had once championed. In the inaugural issue, Anderson evokes

Shakespearean lines when she writes, “Life is a glorious performance: quite apart from its setting, in spite of the kind of ‘part’ one gets, everybody is given at least a chance to act” (1). The trick, however, is not straightforwardly playing one’s part. The “player who merely holds madame's cloak may do it with dignity and grace; and he who changes his role, with a fine freedom and courage, discovers that he's not acting but living his part!” Anderson’s revision emphasizes a form of social activism by privileging the possibility of “changing roles.” Criticism

“that is creative” and has the enthusiastic verve of “youthfulness,” Anderson writes, provides the necessary potential energy to transform one’s role within the play (2). Criticism, she asserts, is essential to the magazine (and to life) because it provides the latent energy to activate “change.”

The twin drives of youth and criticism provided the momentum of the magazine’s early years and gave shape to the philosophy of the magazine. Criticism “is never a merely interpretive function; it is creation: it gives birth!” (emphasis hers). Although books “register the ideas of an age,” most (poor) criticism only deals with their “literary values.” Anderson’s magazine, however, aspires to elucidate the artistic and social dimensions of texts with a “blend of philosophy and poetry.” Achieving this difficult combination would catalyze a social or personal

97 reaction from an otherwise inert object. The pieces that follow Anderson’s editorial reflect the attempt to join the social and the literary: “A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama,” “Rachel [sic]

Varnhagen: Feminist,” “Five Japanese Prints,” “The Prophet of a New Culture,” etc. It is not uncommon to find reports on Emma Goldman’s socialist talks besides Imagist poetry. Anderson lays out the conditions of acceptable submissions to the magazine: “you must say quite frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true” (“What We Are Fighting For,” 4). These standards for the magazine, Anderson claims, mark where she and her readers begin their

“warfare.”

In March 1916, a few months before the Blank Issue, Anderson reiterated the conjoined nature of art and politics. In “Art and Anarchism,” she emphasizes that “anarchism and art are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason” (3). What follows is an anarchistic catechism: “What things must you have to get life out of the process of living? Love, work, recreation. All right. Does the government give you the first three things? Not at all” (3).

Anderson’s catechism portrays a bleak image of government and a human nature unable to

“improve.” Within this bleak picture of life and governance, Anderson begins tilting towards nihilism where “you can never get all the love you imagined from life” and “you are trapped” (6). But, she argues, “the wonder of life begins here,” in the moment of nihilistic epiphany, and “when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is ‘left over’ will find its music or its words.”

“Art and Anarchism” conveys Anderson’s philosophical stance and artistic statement.

She imagines both on the same transcendent arc towards self-realization and change. The

98 anarchistic drive to abandon government and its stifling social norms is the same impetus that leads the artist to genuine and “true” art.

Anderson, however, would eventually consider her anarchistic-artist figure naive or at least under-developed in later issues. In a response to one reader’s letter after the Blank Issue,

Anderson recognizes the reader’s ideals as her “own ravings in the early days of The Little

Review, when [she] talked straight out of the air without anything to back up my words” (18).

The Blank Issue marks the break between the magazine’s early and late formulations of art and society. Despite this break, however, the issues before the Blank Issue show the shared interests of readers and editors before they started to drift apart.

The magazine’s apolitical posturing, which became characteristic only in its later years, was a divergence from its earlier socio-philosophical stance on literature. This difference, however, did not immediately crystalize at the time of Puteklis’s letter, and Jane Heap’s response illustrates a more tentative and gradual commitment to art-for-art’s sake than the magazine’s critical history suggests. Jane Heap writes, “[t]he dreamers, the ones of imagination, have the whole vision—the outside and the inside, and the vision of the two working together with all things. Why do you want to limit them to one—the social vision” (26). Heap’s response does not deny the social “vision’s” relevance to art but expands it to include an interiority. Echoing

Puteklis, she writes,

Art has always been the handmaiden of oppression and superstition, that the

Church has used all forms to hold men to it. True. Let me salute the far-

seeing and mighty wisdom of the Catholic Church that has so recognized the

power of Art.

99 Heap’s response is not a flat-out dismissal of Puteklis or the social powers of literature. Heap recognizes that institutions have leveraged art to reinforce their own ideology and beliefs. Her response implies that there might be more powerful forms of the social when art includes the interior.

Another reader takes up Heap’s initial response in the next issue. Louise Gebhard Cann notices that although “all [her] socialist and anarchist friends hold a similar view” of literature— one that serves a social purpose and portrays the “struggles of the masses”—she nevertheless agrees with Heap that the

human spirit is broader and deeper than mere class consciousness...Art's

strength today is in its revolutionary character. And the revolution of art, like

the social revolution which accompanies it in the world's awakening, will

react beneficially on the human spirit, helping it to ever greater realizations

and liberations. But art, as such, cannot even exist if ENSLAVED to the

social movement” (20–21).

Cann elaborates Heap’s response, providing a literary stance that explicitly links the historical impact of aesthetic choice. Art has the capacity to progress the social revolution because it works upon “the human spirit.” Heap alluded to this in her recognition of art’s role in the Catholic

Church, the symbolism of which helps to give physical form to its dogma and doctrines. Cann, in agreement with Heap, also acknowledges that the “social vision” can just as easily stifle “the world’s awakening” even if it is working towards the same goals as “Art.”

The letters and responses of Puteklis, Heap, and Cann exemplify the sets of concerns that readers conveyed in the aftermath of the Blank Issue. Their conversations are important

100 because they lay out the terms and conceptions of art. In spite of the dramatic flair of the Blank

Issue, the taste of the magazine remained indefinite. Puteklis suggests as much when he asks for a positive definition or manifesto of art.

Combative Collaboration and Dialogic Modernisms

Setting up the two sides of this literary schism—the editors, who insisted on the autonomy of art, and the readers, who demanded art that was politically active—begins to tell a story about the dynamics of literary production in serial publishing. But, it does not tell the whole story yet. It does not explain what happened afterward. Did the editors or readers cave?

Did literary genres also change in the midst of these literary debates and commentary?

Computational methods can help answer these questions and show how the magazine changed over the years. Topic modeling, in particular, is a method that condenses documents to their subject matter and can highlight the emergence of new interests and the disappearance of tiresome topics. Topic modeling, therefore, renders the literary history of The Little Review as a dynamic and evolving environment.

Rather than comparing the rise and fall of singular topics, one can measure the cosine similarity7 between documents to determine whether genres were becoming more or less like each other. In “The Historical Significance of Textual Distances,” Ted Underwood finds that topic modeling and cosine similarity can effectively serve “as a proxy for human judgments about social difference” (2018, 1). This method can highlight the cohesion and gravitational pull

7 Cosine similarity is the cosine of the angle between two vectors. In this case, each vector is the ratio of topics in a single document. Cosine similarity determines orientation rather than magnitude and is more effective at representing data with many dimensions, such as topic modeling.

101 of genres within the magazine over time and illuminates the fluctuations and hybridity of topics.

Andrew Piper describes this approach as “reading topologically,” where instead of defining documents as predominantly about one or two topics, this method instead retains a sense that topics “reside across all documents in different states of likelihood” (2018, Enumerations, 69).

Topic modeling in this way, then, moves beyond descriptions of documents and instead allows

“us to see how ideas cohere, but also fade away.”

Figure 2. A visualization of genre similarity in The Little Review, 1914–1922.

102 Figure 2 shows a side-by-side comparison of the “articles” and “letters” genre within

The Little Review. The left graph shows genre similarities from the perspective of “articles.” The trend lines represent other genres becoming more similar (up) or less similar (down) to articles.

The “articles” line at the top of the left graph indicates that the “articles” genre is identical to itself each year and provides an anchor point from which to measure other genres. The graph on the right visualizes the same from the perspective of the “letters” genre. While the “articles” and

“letters” genre starts in close proximity early in the magazine’s run, indicating that the two genres shared a similar topic composition, it gradually declines until it drops noticeably in 1916, when the Blank Issue was published. These graphs reinforce the textual evidence that The Little

Review was splitting into different communities, separately organized around different interests but hosted within the same magazine. Shared topics and common interests in articles and letters weakens in a way that correlates with the literary debates found when reading individual texts.

The “poetry” genre—represented as another line in each graph—further reveals what an evolving literary community might look like. Once again, 1916 is a conspicuous year. The similarity between readers’ letters and poetry begins to diverge at this time. Meanwhile, the relationship between topics found in articles and poetry stays the same. The relatively flat similarity between poetry and articles after 1916 (seen in the graph on the left) suggests that the two genres developed and changed together each year, and maintain a consistent similarity. In other words, articles and poetry appear to evolve in unison. These graphs illuminate the diverging interests of readers, editors, and poets.

The most common topics in the article and letters genre before and after 1916 further reflect the literary changes within The Little Review and hone in on what specifically changed.

103 Figure 3. Top topics in 1914 and 1918 articles. French words compose the most prevalent topic in 1918.

The addition of French and European topics becomes the most noticeable change when comparing the top topics that appear in articles from 1914 and 1918. Although these years coincide with World War I, the ascension of these topics has little to do with the war. The Little

Review was particularly silent about war news, likely because of its new commitment to apolitical art. Instead, these European topics are likely familiar as they recall the expatriates who left America to practice their art in England, France, and other countries.

The topic model elucidates the evolution of the magazine’s politics into an art coterie.

The topic model suggests that turning away from politically charged literature towards avant- garde, experimental poetry included the promotion of French and continental writers. The movement towards the European art scene would complete The Little Review’s transformation, and Anderson would eventually move the magazine’s operations from New York to Paris.

104 But, what happened to the readers’ political concerns? The topic model only indicates that they diverged but does not articulate whether their interests simply faded away, persisted, or took on new forms of their own. Returning to the magazine with a reading practice informed by the topic model reveals how readers’ interests changed. The readers recognized the editorial trajectory of moving the magazine away from politics, towards experimental art forms, and even further still to European writers. In a parallel movement, the readers interests in politics also transforms.

As the editors were instructing, demonstrating, and performing their new mode of literary criticism in The Little Review, many readers continued to disparage the editorial choices in the magazine. Readers’ feedback, however, changed as well, matching the gradual mutation of the magazine itself. Letters lamenting the loss of social criticism became less frequent. In their place, readers turned their scathing attention to the increasing cohort of European writers that began populating each issue. As The Little Review’s cultural field transformed and the readers’ critiques of the magazine shifted, so too did the editors’ taste in literature, at least partly. The magazine’s American Number shows how the combative collaboration between editors and readers spilled over as Anderson and Heap encountered their own antagonistic literary production.

One reader wistfully recalls a previous issue when the magazine “converted [them] to a faith in New America” (31). Now, however, the reader knows “surely the spirit of the old Little

Review is dead” because it Ezra Pound, who recently became the Foreign Literary Editor, has

“Ezraized” the magazine (32). Although the editors “seem to be proud of [their] evolution,” the reader warns the new issues will “have no appeal to Young America.” Similarly, another reader

105 in the same issue wishes the editors “didn’t have such a craze for foreigners and self-exiled

Americans” (H.L.C., 33) The reader feels “sure there are writers if you would go after them who, if they couldn't write so well, would on the other hand be writing in a familiar manner about subjects known to us and in so doing be creating a literary tradition of our own.”

These two readers typify the changing concerns about the new style of The Little

Review. As the magazine seemingly moved further away from social criticism, it also moved further away from America’s literary scene. Readers conflated the changing state of the magazine

—it’s effort to be less socially aware—with an effort to become more European. Anderson even recognizes this conflation in her response to the reader concerned with Pound’s influence. She writes,

This letter I think will find an echo in the minds of many of our first

subscribers. I have several faults to find with its point of view, but one

especially: I cannot see why personal qualities such as freshness, spontaneity,

enthusiasm, etc., are in any way a guarantee for an interesting or important

magazine (32).

As Anderson’s new vision began to solidify in the aftermath of the Blank Issue, she began addressing the magazine’s run in terms of its earlier and current years. Here, she combines the lack of American authors with a lack of social literature.

After a spate of European writers, the editors’ decision to publish an American Number is striking because it seemingly answers the readers’ call for more “American” authors, finally responding positively to their literary requests. One notable “reader,” William Carlos Williams, also appears in the Reader Critic a few years after the American Number, praising the magazine

106 for having “rewon” him. After acknowledging his own advantage in praising the magazine that recently published his work, Williams writes, “the Little Review is American, that it… is worth while because it maintains contact with common sense in America. It is the only important reaction to the American environment, the only reaction that is not a coat of paint on the stanchion” (60). Williams aligns the magazine’s importance through its relation to America and its own literary tradition.

The June 1918 issue serves as a peculiar intermission from the wave of publications from European writers. It includes poetry and prose from now-famous American and non-

American authors, including William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, Carl

Sandburg, and many others. Heap’s note at the end of the issue clarifies the issue’s purpose:

“[t]his is called an American number not because its contributors are Americans (most of them are not), but because they are all at present living and working in America. It is offered as a resumé of the current work of a representative group” (62). Robert Frost, Mina Loy, and

Marianna Moore would have appeared as well except for delays in the post.

The “Notes” section after the “Reader Critic” heightens the issue’s peculiarity and reveals the dynamic relationships amongst readers and editors. Jane Heap writes, “I am responsible for this issue. It was made with no compromise to Margaret Anderson or Ezra

Pound,” echoing the magazine’s motto. (62). Margaret Anderson follows up with a note of her own:

I believe the world offers sufficient boredoms. I see no reason, while I retain

consciousness, to assist in the process of multiplying them. This is merely to

107 voice my protest against the present number which in several instances, to

me, falls to ‘second interests,’—or below (62).

Heap and Anderson’s disagreement over this issue parallels that between the editors and readers immediately after the Blank Issue. The back and forth between the two editors puts the combative tendencies between readers and editors in new light. It further validates the importance, even the occasional necessity, of antagonistic tensions within literary production.

Readers mirror the disagreement between Anderson and Heap within the Reader Critic.

Heap places two letters together in a tongue-in-cheek move to highlight the impossibility of consensus and the play of disagreeing. E. Hamilton writes,

I have been an enthusiastic reader of the Little Review for two years or more.

Although observing its gradual retrogradation I have been expectant, hoping

that is would come back to its old high standards. But alas! I have given up.

The audacity of publishing Pound’s study of French poets, in French, is

ridiculous beside being inconsiderate of non-French-speaking readers.

Immediately after Hamilton’s letter, Elizabeth Longfellow Siddons writes,

I have wanted for a long time to congratulate you on the great work your

magazine is doing for the cause of real art in America… We have had this

brought home to us, oh so forcibly, by the brilliant things Mr. Pound has said

about the reading public in this country. I can not tell you, though I would

like to, how much we enjoy the things Mr. Pound has so cleverly said about

artistic America in the Little Review. We are grateful to him and to the Little

Review.

108 Heap’s placement of these two letters beside each other and after her own disagreement with

Anderson reveals the centrality of the magazine’s combative collaboration.

The next issue continues the debate between readers and editors. In “On the American

Number: Comment A,” David Diamondstein writes, “Dear ‘jh’: Your ‘American’ number is simply superb!” Immediately after that, X.T. writes in “Comment, plus,” “Cut out the American stuff, please!” (59). And after those two, Morris Reisen writes, “I wonder if you conceived the number because you knew it would be a humorous answer to those who criticise you ‘for printing too much foreign stuff’?” (60). Reisen’s comment, meant to be playful, touches on the generative engagement between readers and editors. He makes explicit the dynamic relationship between the two groups that had developed over the years, starting with the Blank Issue.

The old tensions of politics and art transform and continue as tensions about European and American art. The readers argue that European art will not relate to American readers. The readers and editors also conflate the calls for American literature with the spirit of the old Little

Review, thereby aligning it with its original political mission without addressing politics by name.

Editors Reactions to Reader Responses

While the readers perceived The Little Review as shifting towards European art, the editors saw that same shift in different terms. In countering readers’ calls for socially conscious art and then American art, Anderson reframed the magazine’s interests within artistic technique.

In doing so, she developed an image of the critic as an expert in the mechanical workings of art.

Anderson’s defense of art-for-art’s sake and her image of the artist-as-mechanical-expert developed specifically through her dealings and disagreements with The Little Review’s readers.

109 Her construction of the artist as a professional, similar to an engineer, was a key counter- argument to readers who insisted on a social valence in all literature. She would also evoke the artist-expert at key moments when readers or outsiders demanded a social explanation of art in the magazine, including the magazine’s defense of Ulysses in court. Recovering Anderson’s specialized critic shows how the editors re-imagined their audience and worked to re-define their reader interactions. Furthermore, this editorial shift provides the means to shore up cultural capital without consensus from the magazine’s readers.

Anderson formulates her vision of The Little Review’s audience alongside a consideration of the inconsistency in criticism. While considering the antithetical opinions that

Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Symons2 held about Richard Wagner’s compositions, she writes,

“[e]ach one proved his point” and, therefore, “[i]t's a bit confusing, and you begin to wonder what Art is” (13). The indeterminacy of artistic criticism was a foundational tenet of her editorial practice. As the editor of a magazine that declared itself a tastemaker, she was acutely aware of the impossibility of a universal and timeless definition of art and its values. She admits that neither she, nor anyone else, has “found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold through the whole art miracle.” When Anderson writes editorials on literary taste and evaluates art, she keeps this essential indeterminacy foregrounded in her arguments. The crux of this impossibility, however, did not preclude her calling out “bad” criticism. Although Anderson acknowledges the impossibility of a universally accepted aesthetic, she nevertheless secures for critics a specialized expertise, which, in turn, elevates some opinions over others. A common maneuver in

Anderson’s editorials was to turn away momentarily from the object she’s critiquing and to

110 reflect on others’ failures to appreciate an artist. This tactic allows her to sidestep having to define art while enabling her to maintain her and the magazine’s cultural authority.

In Anderson’s editorial, the disagreement between Nietzsche and Symons serves as a preface that sets up another scene of critical debate. Leo Ornstein, an experimental composer and pianist, had played a private recital for the small staff of The Little Review on their Mason and

Hamlin3. Two years earlier, Ornstein had performed in London where the audience laughed, hissed, and, supposedly, threw things at him (13). Anderson felt that Ornstein’s private recital had “brought something to the world of music: compositions which show that piano music is more pliable than we had thought” (14). At a public recital in Chicago, however, Anderson reports,

Two respectable women sitting near me, who would not have dared—what

do I say? who would not have been able—to laugh at a minister's treatise on

good and evil or a president's speech on loyalty to a flag, were so convulsed

over Ornstein's Impressions of the Thames that they moved their seats to the

rear of the theatre where they could not be watched,—where they could

merely disturb the pianist by their audible snortings (14).

Music critics, she writes, “have done the same thing—laughed at Ornstein's own music and criticised scathingly his manner of playing familiar music.” Although Anderson explains

Ornstein’s importance as an artist, she emphasizes the women’s inability to lend him the critical attention and seriousness that she believes he deserves.

The social and political valence has not completely disappeared from Anderson’s critical framework. She imagines that the two women at Ornstein’s concert would have been

111 incapable of mocking a “minister’s treatise” or a “president’s speech.” She implies that a critical understanding of art requires a detachment from other social conventions that tend to condition critical tastes. The two women, Anderson suggests, are unable to perceive, let alone appreciate art because of their social misconceptions.

Anderson’s editorial on Leo Ornstein extends to her expectations of her own

“audience” of readers as she pivots between her criticism of Ornstein and her veiled social criticism of the two women at the recital. A common thread running throughout Anderson’s editorial practice, often interwoven in her discussions of artists, is her attention to the critical practices of other writers and her readers. Anderson’s formulation of art and art criticism is bound up in certain, unspoken rules that distinguish good art from bad and good critics from bad critics. Understanding this link is crucial for understanding the ways her theory of art-for-art’s sake and readerly engagement mutually developed after the Blank Issue.

In “The Great Emotional Mind,” Anderson chastises the uninitiated lay people who claim to have a comprehension of art. She constructs the art critic in terms of profession and expertise. “Everyone talks about Art when he wants to be interesting,” she writes, “[w]hether he knows anything about it or not makes no difference” (1). In this article, Anderson establishes a recurring analogy, which she uses to partition off art-knowledge and reserve it for a select few.

Anderson looks outside to other fields of expertise to solidify the expertise of the artist. “You can tell a man that unless he’s an expert in interstate railway regulation he mustn’t argue with a man who is,” and yet, “if you tell him that he mustn't argue with an artist, not being one himself, he considers your remark insulting.” Anderson hints at a key point in her philosophical stance on art

112 by connecting artistic expertise to other professional fields, which she will do at significant moments in later issues4.

Although she writes, “art is the carefully-selected expression of the artist,” there is a clear gesture that this personalized expression moves beyond the individual and resides in a space accessible solely to professional and expert scrutiny. Through her responses to readers’ letters, Anderson offers instruction on the new terms of criticism in the magazine: critical indeterminacy might be acceptable but criticism without an awareness of art’s mechanisms is not. For instance, Allan Tanner from Chicago criticizes Harold Bauer’s musical compositions, claiming that Bauer has acquired “beautiful tonal effects” through simple rote practice and

“mechanical things done to perfection” (18). He lacks “that spiritual thing” that transcends his music above an assemblage of techniques and dexterity. Anderson responds: “This sounds like my own ravings in the early days of The Little Review, when I talked straight out of the air without anything to back up my words.” Anderson’s allusion to the magazine’s “early days” provides a glimpse at her conceptualization of the state of the magazine before and after the

Blank Issue. The “vague mist” that enshrouds the critics’ minds when they “talk of [the]

‘spiritual’” essence of art has been abandoned (19). In its place, Anderson evokes the very things

Tanner finds insufficient: technique and the mechanical ability of both the player and instrument.

She writes, “the piano isn’t capable of everything. It is capable of some very special things, and

Bauer is the first man to prove it.” Anderson’s praise of Bauer is connected to his awareness of the piano’s limits and constraints. She dismisses the transcendent or spiritual and celebrates the musician’s realization of the instrument’s mechanical limitations. Bauer, she writes, “has stood for that alone in a world of ignorant criticism.”

113 Anderson’s attention to the technique and mechanics of art overtook social reviews as the magazine’s priority and became the new scheme of evaluation in the magazine after the

Blank Issue. The emergence of an artistic expertise in Anderson’s conception of the artist and art critic is a new modulation of her earlier social criticisms before the Blank Issue. Her evocation of

Shakespeare and reader-critics “changing their roles” in the inaugural issue similarly located the value of art and art-criticism in the individual rather than society. But, the expertise of the individual signals a key difference between the two constructions of the individual and of criticism. Anderson recognizes this transition when she acknowledges the magazine’s “early days” and her own “ravings.” The rise of mechanical expertise and artistry in Anderson’s stance is developed through her interactions with readers often as a counter-argument to their calls for socially-informed literature.

Anderson’s focus on literary technique comes to replace the “social vision” of literature that many readers favored in the early years. Her portrayal of criticizing others’ criticism showcases her changing interests in the use of literature. Anderson’s subordination of social reviews in favor of mechanistic literary criticism caused apparent tension with many readers; however, the social valence of this new criticism—at least in the magazine’s universe— re-emerged in later issues in a different manner.

Anderson was required to re-confront the social valence of literature when the U.S.

Post Office prosecuted and convicted The Little Review for publishing the “Nausicaa” episode from James Joyce’s Ulysses and Wyndham Lewis’s “Cantleman’s Spring-Mate” (Flack and

Vanderham, pp. 37-56). In “Ulysses’ in Court,” Anderson blasts the judges that blocked the publication of Ulysses. Echoing her criticism of the two women at Ornstein’s recital, Anderson’s

114 critique focuses on the judges’ failure to read Ulysses according to the proper criteria. Their judicial logic, she argues, fails to comprehend Joyce’s work. She first wonders,

[W]hy must I stand up as a tribute to three men who wouldn’t understand my

simplest remark… [The judges’] only function is to decide whether certain

passages of ‘Ulysses’ (incidentally the only passages they can understand)

violate the statute.—(Is this a commentary on ‘Ulysses’ or on the minds of

the judges?) But I must not dream of asking such a question (23).

The judges’ inability to understand Ulysses rests in their lack of artistic expertise. Anderson reports on Philip Moeller’s5 attempt to “answer the judges’ questions with intelligence” and, after asking to use “technical terminology,” he precedes to explain that “the objectionable chapter is an unveiling of the subconscious mind, in the Freudian manner, and that he saw no possibility of these revelations being aphrodisiac in their influence.” Anderson frames the court case as a matter of artistic expertise and technicalities (of a “Freudian manner”) against the judges’ inexperienced opinions. Their reactions at the terminology of “subconscious” and “Freudian manner,” Anderson writes, elicits objections: “Here, here you might as well talk Russian.” The literary technicalities baffle the judges, making them ill-equipped to judge art. Anderson again evokes the expertise and technical aspects of art, which she developed specifically from her conversations with readers after the Blank Issue.

The readers observed the magazine’s court battles with curiosity. Their responses range from asking when Ulysses might appear in book form; if “the public will ever be ready for such a book”; and, concerns that Joyce belongs to those of a “certain form of mental unbalance—about the lowest form—that takes delight in concentration on the ‘natural functions’” (“Reader Critic,”

115 TLR, 7.1). One reader, however, seems to echo Anderson’s calls for literary criticism unaffected by social conventions. Walter Shaw asks the editors why they will bother to “report all the blatant ineptitudes of the court proceedings” and wonders, “[s]urely none of your audience gives a damn what the court says” (61). The court’s decisions, Shaw contends, is “a matter of sociology—not at all within the field of art.” His comments align with Anderson’s own separation of artistic expertise and judicial knowledge. Shaw imagines himself within the inner- circle of artists, one untouched by “the organized stupidity of the non-aesthetics,” and, therefore, capable of debating the value of Joyce’s works. After this claim, he then “demand[s]” that the editors explain Joyce’s artistry according to their “duty” as evaluators of art.

Shaw’s letter takes up Anderson’s formulation of art criticism as something reserved for artists and their particular expertise but dismisses Joyce’s status as an artist. In the letter’s

“demand” and assertion of their “duty” as critics, his argument also grinds against the magazine’s motto: “Making No Compromise with Public Taste.” His response echoes Puteklis’s attempt to engage the editors in debate years before when he asked, “for whom is The Little Review published,” except he has already denied the social dimension of art. His argument performs art criticism in the mode that Anderson has demonstrated but arrives at a different conclusion.

Heap’s response to Shaw attempts to deny him his perceived right to “demand” justification of Joyce’s works. But, her argument struggles to respond convincingly and exposes the editors’ use of disagreement to generate interest. She writes, “Certainly the critic has the right to prove his case if he has the necessity to make other men see and believe what he has perceived; but no one can demand it of him” (61). Heap’s use of “necessity” suggests a personal or internal need to share great works and differs from the external pressures of a “demand.” Both

116 editors imagined Joyce’s work as perhaps the most important work of their time, which needed to be shared. Anderson makes this clear in her report from court. When a judge wonders, “I can’t see why any one would want to publish [Ulysses],” Anderson thinks to herself,

“‘Let me tell you why’—I almost leap from my chair. ‘Since I am the

publisher it may be apropos for me to tell you why I have wanted to publish

it more than anything else that has even been offered to me… and why you

have no right to pit the dulness of your brains against the fineness of

mine’” (“Ulysses’ in Court” 24–25).

Heap seems to immediately subvert this need to share in her response to Shaw when she writes,

“If you and your friends who think [Ulysses] only interesting have not the perception or the grace to know that Joyce is an artist, then no second sight could come to you, I fear.” If Joyce’s words alone are not enough to convince readers of its artistry, she argues, then nothing else will— including, it would seem, the critic. The exchange between Shaw and Heap is not a case of one argument being better or more persuasive. Instead, it highlights a key tactic within the magazine: disagreement. Heap does not seek to explain to Shaw why Ulysses is a work of art through an exegesis of Joyce’s artistic techniques. Rather, she dismisses Shaw for lacking the right perception.

Unlike W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis or A.R. Orage’s New Age, which sought to acquire literary and social capital through dialogic debate, Anderson and Heap actively evaded agreement with their readers. Rather than providing reasons for readers’ to validate the magazine,

The Little Review frequently withdrew and withheld such reasons for their aesthetic judgments, first behind mechanical reasons of artistic medium then behind mystic explanations such as their

117 “perception or the grace to know that Joyce is an artist.” This maneuver in the social and literary field operates according to a different logic than most periodicals and the conventional framework of taste. The cultural capital of The Little Review was not established on principals that affirm value through social consensus. Instead, they generated readerly engagement through evasion and disagreement.

Conclusion

The Blank Issue put in motion a divisive interplay between readers and editors. The back and forth between the two groups help to generate editorial responses and shaped the magazine’s stance on art-for-art’s sake. The Blank Issue and its aftermath illuminates the ways that editors, authors, and readers understood the cultural field of the magazine and engaged with its seriality. From the inaugural issue, each group took the expected and tacit roles present in any other magazine at the time. But when The Little Review published their Blank Issue and broke their own seriality, these roles suddenly surfaced and became explicit and strange. Readers took up this opportunity and wrote letters to the editors questioning their decisions and demanding a justification for their editorial choices. Editors published their responses besides those letters and provided longer explanations in their articles. Authors, often evoked as proxies or signifiers of cultural taste, were quieter. Certainly, their pieces were published, but that was hardly a self- evident form of approval, especially in The Little Review.

The short history of the Blank Issue elucidates the centrality of readers in the combative evolution of culture and the continuous mutation of literary taste. They haggled with editors and authors over the evaluation of literary value. The magazine’s decision to print a

Blank Issue and skip the next month’s issue altogether indicates a significant restructuring—one

118 that would go on to define the terms of canonical, High Modernism. Anderson’s decision to reorganize the magazine also highlights the processes through which taste and literature are formed and produced—a process that situates readers as active and essential participants. The combative collaboration of readers, editors, and authors became a generative force in the magazine’s production.

Reading the run of The Little Review across the Blank Issue also reveals the peculiar nature of generating cultural capital through disagreement and combativeness. Disagreement, especially in The Little Review, differs from debate. Other magazines encouraged debates to play out across issues, which included disagreement. These debates, however, posed at least the possibility of eventual agreement or mutual understanding. In contrast, the editors of The Little

Review regularly denied agreement with their readers and evaded a collective consensus—even when readers would reiterate the editors’ claims.

The immaterial, cultural capital of The Little Review differs from traditional models of capital. The “symbolic efficacy” of cultural capital—its ability to convert immaterial capital into deferred economic capital efficiently —is “conferred by being recognized [and] mandated by collective belief” (Distinction, 254–255). Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural capital in its various states (embodied, objectified, and institutionalized) depends on two key aspects: its scarcity or rareness and a collective consensus that lends validation through “transubstantiation” and “social alchemy” (“The Forms of Capital,” 241 and 248). All forms of capital, including economic, are arbitrary and rely upon a collective, social agreement of their value. Even taste- makers, whose initial move is to transgress the collective belief and unsettle the status-quo, nevertheless rely on the eventual recognition of others to verify and install them as significant

119 actors with a rare form of cultural competency. Taste-makers seek to impose their taste on the field through “a definition of excellence which, being nothing other than their own way of existing, is bound to appear simultaneously as distinctive and different, and therefore both arbitrary (since it is one among others) and perfectly necessary, absolute and natural.” Artists transgress only to be seen as “natural” in order to acquire the powers that attend symbolic, and by extension social, status. Even in the inverse economy of the artistic universe, certain forms of cultural capital rely on the social recognition of cultural competency.

As scholars such as Mark Morrisson and Lawrence Rainey have pointed out, the supposed hermetic seal between Modernism and commercialization was surprisingly porous. The

Little Review adopted many advertising strategies to promote its own symbolic affiliation with youth culture (Morrisson). Many contributors to the magazine, including Ezra Pound and James

Joyce, were more interested on their economic success than some accounts let on and deployed anti-commercial rhetoric as a form of reputation building and market branding (Rainey). The

Little Review was simultaneously hostile to notions of commercial success while it actively sought and beseeched subscriptions and financial support. The irony was not lost on one reader who writes to the editors, “why do the magazines that publish this transcendent art push as hard as ‘the vulgar sort’ for sales? (See pages 61 and 64 of your June issue)” (T.D. O’B., 58). The market branding and anti-commercial posturing, however, does not fully explain The Little

Review’s methods for generating symbolic capital.

The Little Review promoted its own elite and rare stature—occasionally identifying itself as the magazine “read by those who write the others”—but it denied the second essential element of cultural capital: consensus and naturalization with its own readers. The editors

120 disagreed with the readers and, at key moments, themselves. Their disagreements and combative posturing blocked the “collective belief” that could bestow capital; and yet, this same posturing served to generate interest and prestige within a serial medium. Although the letters to the editors reveal the nearly chronic state of readerly disapproval, Anderson and Heap’s disagreements nevertheless functioned as a form of readerly engagement. The editors’ disagreements with readers’ letters often influenced the editorial articles and content, showing that the readers’ letters served as a key element in the magazine’s continuation and production.

The Blank Issue broke the normal and expected processes of the magazine medium. It interrupted its seriality and refused to unify heterogeneous materials into a coherent narrative. It also divided its audience from its editors, thereby creating a rupture in its print network. This division and tension, however, also cultivated a state of combative collaboration. The disagreements between readers and editors, and eventually editors and editors, was a significant factor in the early formation of key High Modernist ideals.

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126 The Merits of Mediocrity: Harriet Monroe’s Great Audience and Poetic Composting

The annoyance of being forever coupled with something or somebody that

has gone before, is a part of the artist's reward for creating something worth

while; one is never curious about the ancestry of mediocrity. And yet it is

inevitable that a work of genius should start a train of associations.

Alice Corbin Henderson, “Correspondences” (August 1916)

Introduction

In the October 1914 issue of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, Harriet Monroe and Ezra

Pound published opposing opinions on the relationship between the artist and audience. Ezra

Pound’s opening salvo begins, “I have protested privately, and now I protest more openly, against the motto upon the cover of Poetry” (29). Referring specifically to a quotation from Walt

Whitman—“To have great poets there must be great audiences too”—Pound lays out his well- known tract against the “rabble of ‘respectable’ people,” who might infect an individual’s genius.

Harriet Monroe, on the other hand, dismisses Pound’s world of “immediate audiences” reminiscent of the “stay-at-home aristocratic age.” She argues “Art is not an isolated phenomenon of genius, but the expression of a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public” (31—32). The debate between Monroe and Pound now marks a well-known moment in modernist studies: Pound would declare Poetry a “meal-ticket” for mediocre artists and join like- minded editors at The Little Review while Monroe would continue her successful editorship without him.

But, why did Monroe think literary taste needed a great audience and what was this audience's relationship to the production of Poetry? Poetry now claims a central position within

127 modernist studies. The magazine promoted canonical and non-canonical authors of the twentieth century. Many critics, including Ann Massa, Robin G. Schulze, and John Timberman

Newcombe, have recovered the significance of Monroe’s magazine and editorial labors. Poetry,

Bartholomew Brinkman argues, played a central role in turning the poem “into an aesthetic object for contemplation, both through an aesthetic discourse that compared the poem to the art object and through the placement of the individual poem on the page, framed by a border of white space” (22). Imagism, in particular, benefitted from the Poetry’s use of white space.

Nevertheless, Monroe and Pound’s disagreement on aesthetics and the audience finally broke an increasingly tense partnership. Monroe’s camp would promote an eclectic, but mostly American poetry scene while The Little Review would showcase European writers. The debate betweenMonroe and Pound put into question the significance of the audience.8 And yet, little attention has been paid to the magazine’s readers and the ways they interacted with the magazine and its editors.

8 There is an echo of Monroe and Pound’s debate within the same issue (5.1) between Amy Lowell and Alice Corbin Henderson. Supporting key points in Pound’s argument, Lowell writes, “The only motto for a serious artist is: WORK! Instead of begging us to be what we are not, the critics should urge us to be more fully what we are. Only so will they hasten the day when America will have the great artists for which she clamors” (37—38). Henderson, Monroe’s assistant editor at the time, re-aligns Des Imagistes: An Anthology with the collective work of Poetry, when she writes, “There is much individual variety in the expression of the eleven poets represented in this anthology, but all the poems are more or less bound together by certain tendencies which it is unnecessary to indicate here, as the principles of Imagism have been set forth at some length in this magazine and about three-fourths of the poems included were first published in POETRY. The collection of the poems in a single volume is valuable as affording a concentrative expression of the group, and an appended bibliography increases its value for the collector” (40). While Lowell insists on the individuality of the artist, Henderson offers the reminder that Imagism grew from the pages of Poetry.

128 Letters to the editor, published within most issues, capture how readerly participation partly shaped literary production. Readers wrote to the magazine to share creative literary devices, offer pointed criticism, and suggest other poetic traditions for inspiration (and appropriation).9 Letters to the editor demonstrate Monroe’s “great audience” at work. The letters illuminate the audience’s relationship to art and, in particular, modernism. Restoring the visibility of readers to literary production provides first-hand accounts of a key literary phase in American literature. Adding readers’ voices to modernist studies highlights their interest in the “mediocre” poetry that revolted Pound. But, readers did not simply dismiss poems they considered “bad.”

Instead, they often imagined how the good parts of any poem could be recycled for something better. Poetry, then, became composite, forming from a collective input, including reader feedback. The letters to the editor portray an artistic process built on communal effort. Literature considered mediocre or even bad might have something to offer the future of American literature.

Literary reputation was ultimately subordinate to the understanding that any poem could be disassembled and re-purposed for new work, which might surpass the original in quality but nevertheless be in its debt. Although the readers of Poetry had discerning taste—they debated what was good and what was not—they sought to recuperate the “good” qualities within “bad” poetry rather than dismiss them outright. Viewing literary production in this way, readers complicated notions of individual genius and, in its place, installed a different understanding of

9 As Elizabeth Barnett argues in “Destroyed by Poetry: Alice Corbin and the Little Magazine Effect,” the sources of “inspiration” could be far-reaching and included the appropriation of other cultures and indigenous groups. Monroe’s “great audience” was not exempt from the logic of colonization.

129 cultural creation: both good and bad texts are things to decompose, aggregate, cohere, and contribute towards future work. Many readers of Poetry saw mediocre art as a healthy and generative compost for the future works of readers and authors.

The “great audience” of Monroe’s vision becomes most apparent in the context of mediocre poetry. But, to understand mediocre poetry within modernism and, therefore, the centrality of the readers, it is necessary to develop a reading method that can traverse multiple scales of analysis and span numerous issues. Letters from readers have a temporal quality that connects previous and future issues together. Readers participate in these textual strategies when they write their reflections on past content with the hopes of seeing their concerns answered in the future. As Hannah McGregor argues, the seriality of magazines “challenge[s] familiar critical modes of reading” as “the complex interplay of seriality and hypermediacy” rise to the surface

(250). Close reading often diminishes the seriality of these texts and treats them as static materials that rest still in time. Close reading, in the sense of what Paul Ricoeur calls

“hermeneutics of suspicion,” excels at identifying dominant cultural or formalistic aspects of literature but struggles to comprehend how such aspects change.

While computational reading can model temporal changes within magazine texts, it alone cannot attend to the subtleties of literature and is not capable of fully describing the aspects found with close reading. Both reading methods are required to understand how readers participated in the formation (and transformations) of modernism. The conversations of readers and contributors slowly unfolded over time, forming explicit and implicit connections between texts. Poetry published works with the expectation of literary evolution: bad art was the productive, though botched experiments for future success. Many readers believed that timeless

130 works did not appear in a vacuum. Rather great works were the result of slow work and many hands.

To understand the relationships amongst authors, mediocre poetry, and the “great audience,” I will combine close and computational readings. After close reading letters to the editor and elucidating literary production from the readers’ perspectives, I will then leave behind readers’ letters in order to understand the full extent of their “reciprocal relationship.”

Computational methods assist in recovering the readers’ vision by tracking literary influence and poetic composting. Although neither close nor machine reading here find exact moments of influence, such as lines lifted directly from readers’ letters or explicit authorial statements, computers can use textual similarities to find possible lineages of influence. Once computational methods have connected texts with similarities—texts that possibly draw from the same inspirational source—close reading can restore their poetic complexity. Moving from readers’ letters to computational reading to close reading introduces interpretive spaces. Far from asserting any form of objectivity, this three-step process multiplies the analytical possibilities.

Beginning with a provisional theory of Monroe’s “great audience” and readers’ descriptions of literary production, this method zooms out searching for moments where parts of poetry may have been reused, and then moves once again to understand why these similarities might surface in the first place. As such, this method does not stay still but moves from different objects

(readers’ letters, computational readings, poetry) employing different means of exploration.

Close and computational reading provide complementary evidence of seriality and literary production. Close reading explicates the dense materials of literariness, such as figurative language and other formal features, and clarifies how individual parts synthesize into themes or

131 reveal larger structures. Computational reading accumulates word frequencies to illuminate large-scale textual patterns and organizes those details within interpretable frameworks of shifting discourses, interests, or styles. Together, both classes of evidence work to model literature has an evolving system, constrained by environmental pressures but also capable of change.

The hybrid method of close and computational reading allows me to move beyond a static model of literature and understand Poetry as a dynamic system. Moving across different textual objects and leveraging different scales of analysis enables me to assess the emergent dimensions of literary influence and change. Namely, this hybrid method attends to the morphology of culture, asking how dominant literary forms weaken and how non-dominant forms gain strength. Readers saw literary culture continuously changing. Language encapsulates ideas and styles and, through repetition, aggregation, and consolidation, patterns in language become naturalized. Tracking these changes within language elucidates the priorities of taste by highlighting the concepts that are most frequently circulated. It is not simply a case of language reflecting cultural values, though. Language constructs and maintains those cultural values as well. Language, therefore, also provides opportunities to destabilize taste and shift cultural capital to different actors. The emergence of a new style or literary interest can, in turn, reshape the literary environment and power dynamics. Attending to poetic composting as a mode of literary production and tracking textual re-use of poetry becomes a question about how literary forms become dominant and seen as valuable.

Seriality and temporality play important roles in revealing how literary forms become dominant or fade away. In “Time: Periodicals and the Time of Now,” Margaret Beetham lays out

132 how “time is given meaning for readers, not only by the regular occurrence of each number but also by the textual strategies that make time meaningful in different publications” (324). Seriality provides time for readers to engage with the magazine’s production. While seriality enables reader interaction, the temporality of each magazine informs how it understands new content.

Each new issue, then, re-stages the contest of literary taste. As a continuous revision of the literary scene, the temporality of magazines constantly animates power dynamics centered on literary taste and debates on “good” or “bad” art.

Readers’ letters put familiar literary terms in motion. The composting of “mediocre” poetry—to use one reader’s metaphor—mirrors the circulation of literary taste. Literary studies can understand how cultural capital transfers and mutates over time by following the cultivation of “mediocre poetry,” a path that begins with readers’ criticisms and travels through the publication of multiple poems. Letters to the editors in Poetry cultivated a community of artistic creation and criticism. Readers’ understanding of literary production, illustrated by machine reading, depicts literature as a fluid, contestable state rather than stable structure.

Communal Labor in Letters

We begin to see Monroe’s audience at work by focusing on readers’ understanding of mediocre poetry. Many readers of Poetry believed American literature was undergoing a renaissance, one initiated by Whitman and Emerson but accelerated by new poets in the twentieth century. These new poets, readers often argued, contributed to a rising American culture that would soon rival Europe’s literary legacy. Along the way, poets’ experimentations would often fall short of their proclaimed goals. Rather than disparage these supposed failures, readers valued their efforts. Many readers describe mediocre poetry—poetry they themselves do

133 not consider good—as a latent, generative force. Readers hoped that even a bad poem could offer a small piece to the next American masterpiece, which might finally announce America’s arrival on the global (that is, white and Western) literary scene.

One letter in particular praises poetry as mediocre and, in doing so, offers a vision of literary production centered on audience participation, communal labor, and cultural creation. In

“The New Beauty” (April 1915), Leeroy Titus Weeks offers two challenges to Pound’s dismissal of the audience. In prose, Weeks first argues for the importance, even necessity, of mediocre poetry. Then, Weeks appends his argument with a short, playful poem that demonstrates readerly participation in literary production. Together, Weeks’s prose and poem illustrate the sorts of readerly engagements in Monroe’s magazine. Paying critical attention to Weeks’s letter re- inscribes readers in the formation of modernism. Weeks’s letter shines light on Monroe’s “great audience.” Letters to Poetry show a literary culture concerned with composting mediocre poetry

—breaking old materials down for re-use in later works—rather than radical originality.

Weeks’s letter is a response to Pound’s article, “The Renaissance” (February 1915). In his article, Pound accuses American authors and Poetry of fostering a “cult of mediocrity” (232).

This cult, he argues, overly-inflates the value of regional, American poetry with unwarranted praise and flattering criticism. Poetry, Pound claims, breeds a “contentment with what has been produced” rather than “setting a standard for ambition.” The “decent artist weeps over a failure,” he argues, “a rotten artist tries to palm it off as a masterpiece” (233). The “cult of mediocrity” re- iterates Pound’s opposition to Monroe’s “great audience.”

Pound valorizes individuality by comparing literature to science. Classes in “American literature,” he argues, are as valuable as “course[s] in ‘American chemistry,’ neglecting all

134 foreign discoveries” (232—233). The scientific analogy permits Pound to imagine artistic creation as one of discovery. Newness is waiting to be found as if detached from human culture.

The only usefulness of other readers, Pound suggests, is to prevent artistic imitations: the “value of a capital or metropolis is that if a man in a capital cribs, quotes or imitates, someone else immediately lets the cat out of the bag and says what he is cribbing, quoting or imitating” (227).

Pound hopes to purge all imitation from literary production, which leads him to dismiss

Monroe’s “great audience” and American literature.

Weeks’s letter challenges Pound’s confidence in newness and the very possibility of poetic “discovery.” With playful sarcasm, Weeks stands in “bewilderment before the vast knowledge of Mr. Ezra Pound,” who holds “final judgment” for literary works at “his study table” (48). Pound, “full of fust and ferment,” rails against the literary tradition as “the apostle of discontent” and, in doing so, sets himself apart as tastemaker of “the New Beauty.” Weeks, however, reminds him that the “same spirit of unrest, discontent…was in the veins” of Milton,

Wordsworth, and Tennyson. The “new” beauty, Weeks argues, is never entirely new. As Pound builds his new poetic “heaven” and “earth,” Weeks reminds him that there have been millions already. Weeks writes, “like every new growth of the coral islands, simply rising out of and upon the old beauty,” the new beauty “never shakes itself loose from the old.” By locating Pound within a literary tradition, Weeks begins to establish literary production as a collective effort.

An engaged audience can improve and re-shape the literary devices within mediocre poetry for future works. Weeks offers a communal vision of literary production by inverting

Pound’s formula that imitation equals mediocrity. Instead, masterpieces are indebted to the mediocre poems they choose to imitate. “Without a vast field of mediocre poetry,” Weeks writes,

135 “we could have no literature. Mediocre poetry is the compost heap on which grow Shakespeares”

(49). By attributing the “Shakespeares” of literature to the compost heap of lesser poets, Weeks denies the significance of a solitary writer. Weeks privileges a community of writers constantly rewriting the values of art. Poetry does not stand still waiting to be discovered. Rather, “all poetry, all criticism, will be like the North Pole—every succeeding moment it will point in a new direction through a period of twenty-two thousand years, and then begin over” (49). Weeks sees literary production as a constant flux. Writers recursively revise each other’s works and, in doing so, orient the field of literature ever so slightly towards their “North Pole.” Literary innovation, then, happens gradually through collaboration and the coalescence of different voices. As such, the evolution of poetry, from mediocre to masterpiece, demands a group effort and matures through collective cultivation.

As Weeks’s letter argues for the importance of mediocre poetry, his appended poems demonstrate the readers’ roles in this artistic cultivation. The very presence of Weeks’s poem destabilizes “poet” and “reader” as distinct categories. Recovering the materials found in Poetry reminds us that these distinctions only solidified with retrospective analysis: poets read and readers wrote. Even Pound implies the importance of reading for his own work by listing the authors he studies to improve his poetic “palette.” The presence of Weeks’s poetry shows that readers could participate through criticism and literature. Readers were also creators in literary production, not bystanders.

Weeks’s second poem, in particular, playfully echoes his arguments against Pound. In

“Tommy Rot,” a weaver impresses a court with the loud rumblings of his “Wonderful loom, /

With fruit of pure color” (50). As the Queen and courtiers marvel at the “Old things…passed

136 away, / And / All things / Are become new,” the speaker admits he cannot see the tapestry. The weaver and the court share the assumption that “None but the initiated may see the web.” The dissatisfied speaker cannot see the web and proclaims there is nothing there except the “mighty rattling of the loom.” He then slashes down the “magic web” and the “jig is up” (51).

More than simply a heavy-handed critique of literary elitism, “Tommy Rot” presents an allegory of the interplay between individuals and communities. The tableau of two individuals, the speaker and the weaver, corresponds rather easily to Weeks (as the reader) and

Pound (as the poet). While the weaver momentarily mesmerizes the Queen’s cohort (the audience), the speaker quickly undoes the weaver’s trick by breaking his machine. Weeks’s focus in his poem is not the web or loom, but how each figure interacts with the other.

Although the speaker and weaver are cast as oppositional figures in the poem, it remains ambiguous who Tommy Rot is. The name, offered by the title but never attributed to a character, suits both the weaver and the speaker. Tommy Rot could be the weaver whose “New

Beauty” deteriorates “Old things [that] are passed away.” His eagerness to produce leads to the stabilization of “newness” and “oldness” as categorically different. In this sense, the weaver also creates the “rot” by introducing the “new beauty” that breaks down older values, which are no longer interesting or fruitful. Tommy Rot could also be the speaker, though, who plays the spoilsport and ruins the elaborate illusion of the weaver and the crowd’s suspension of disbelief.

While the weaver inadvertently makes old things pass away, the speaker seems pleased to “slash the magic web” and wreck the conceit shared by the other characters. If rot refers to dematerializing or breaking down, then the speaker’s actions are the most literal correspondence.

137 Weeks does not suggest the speaker’s actions restore or regenerate the old beauty in any way.

The speaker and the weaver, therefore, each participate in rotting moments of artistic creation.

By conceptually linking the weaver and speaker through the ambiguity of the name,

Weeks suggests that both catalyze artistic decomposition. The conceit of “Tommy Rot,” then, hinges on oldness and newness in dialogical balance. The “rot” of the poem resonates with

Weeks’s compost metaphor in his prose. Criticism and creation, then, become essential counterparts for a productive literary environment. Mediocre poetry obtains value because it is the fuel of literary production. A bad poem is an act of creation on its own but also prompts criticism, which in turn guides further creations.

The artistic evaluation within the poem’s scene rests on Weeks’s playful turn of the

“mediocre,” which performs a semantic somersault making criticism into praise. Both letter and poem praise mediocrity for its potential to cultivate literary masterpieces—a potential that readers can actualize through their letters to the editor, which includes criticism and creative works alike. This communal vision of artistic creation differs from Pound’s scientific one. Weeks acknowledges that his status as a reader and amateur poet does not match Pound’s expertise. He notes that Pound might not “become in any most distant way aware of [his letter] at all” (48).

But, Pound’s recognition is not needed for readers to engage with literary production as a collective. By writing to Poetry, Weeks’s acts as Monroe’s “great audience” by providing the reciprocal relationship for artists. His and others’ letters are the “receptive” counterpart to the literary “producers.” His letter and poem, along with other readers’ letters, offer another framework for modernist creation that displaces Pound’s insistence on “make it new.”

138 Weeks’s letter provides a detailed example of Monroe’s “great audience” at work and the centrality of readers in establishing a new, American literary taste. Various writers contributed numerous letters and articles to promote the significance of American literature. In

“A Perfect Return” (December 1912), Harriet Monroe contemplates the perceived transformation of mediocrity as it moves from America to Europe, where it is supposedly refined, and then returns to America where it can be appreciated. She considers Edgar Allen Poe’s influence on

“Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and through them upon English Poets, and then through these last upon Americans” (87). She then asks, “Must we always accept American genius in this round-about fashion. Have we no true perspective that we applaud mediocrity at home, and look abroad for genius, only to find that it is of American origin” (87). Five years after Monroe’s piece (December 1917), Theodore Stanton, the American correspondent of the Mercure de

France, echoes Monroe. While reporting on the semi-centennial of Baudelaire’s death, Stanton writes, “M. Robert Lestrange, who was one of the organizers of the ceremony, writes me in this connection: ‘As it is impossible to fête the author of Les Fleurs du Mal without also fêting Edgar

Poe, whose works he translated in such a masterly way, the occasion united in the same tribute of admiration the two great writers’” (168). Poetry worked to support American writers immediately rather than wait for European approval. But, no single text could change this circulation of influence and this work required time and an active audience.

In order to validate American literature at the international level, readers of Poetry often imagined literature and textuality in terms that resonated with Weeks’s compost metaphor.

In their efforts to re-appraise American writers, readers implicitly proposed an informal theory of literature as a composite object, layered with the work of previous labor. In “Art and Eiffel

139 Towers” (May 1920), for example, Fritz R. Vanderpyl imagines art as a coalescence of different ideas grown together:

What we call a style is only an ensemble of material and sentimental details,

brought together by temporary circumstances on one spot of the globe.

Chinese pottery, Japanese lacquer-work, the shape of oceanic shells, Greek

mythology and the rose-color preferred by a Dubarry—here are some

elements of what we call rococo (99).

Although Vanderpyl does not invoke mediocrity here, his description of rococo resonates with

Weeks’s compost metaphor: style is not discovered or created so much as it is sewn together from diverse techniques. The process of style Vanderpyl proposes takes time to naturalize and can seem odd or in poor taste at first.

Monroe, Weeks, and others articulate the constructiveness (and arbitrariness) of literary taste—ideas now familiar in contemporary criticism. In Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins argues that authors attain literary prestige through others who argue on their behalf and, therefore, their prestige embodies “only the interests of whatever parties or factions are responsible for maintaining them in that position” (1986, 20). Weeks’s argument runs parallel to

Tompkins’s in that both associate literary prestige with circumstantial factors rather than an inherent quality. Weeks’s argument locates these circumstantial factors specifically within serialization. The various circumstances that shape eventual masterpieces can occur before publication—that is, during the writing process. In serial publications like Poetry, the construction of literary value becomes entangled with production, reception, and circulation.

140 Unlike bounded novels or collected poems, which appear finished and static, cultural works published in magazines exhibit fluidity.

Although a close reading of selected letters magnifies readers’ activities within literary production, close reading alone does not convey the temporal linkages the letters themselves forged. Readers’ letters open up a dialogue that plays out in the magazine’s seriality. Their conversations link texts together, sorting them into different styles and literary schools. Taste, therefore, could change as texts circulated, and readers played a central role in creating and maintaining literary values by writing letters to the editors. The letters of Weeks and others imagine the construction of taste as an ongoing and communal project. Weeks’s own letter continues a conversation that originated between Monroe and Pound. His poems, then, add to their debate. This communal literary practice comes into view when letters to the editors are recovered but close reading can only show that it existed.

The readers’ communal development of poetry calls for a mode of analysis that attends to the magazine’s seriality. Unlike Pound’s belief that great art was discovered in a vacuum, readers and many poets understood literature as collective effort that accelerated with textual circulation. Poets could speed up this process by borrowing, adapting, and mixing from various styles. The readers’ letters show one side of this process, but how did authors respond to this model of literary production?

Vectors of Influence

As many letters from Poetry indicate, readers understood literary production as a collective effort unfolding over time. Readers imagined each new text adding another layer to culture, which would slightly change the field of literature. T.S. Eliot articulates a similar

141 concept in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he writes, “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new” (101).

The present modifies the past as new texts change the cultural environment. Taken individually, poems and letters provide still-shots of a process that required time and collaboration. But, these still-shots only show sections of the process. How did the communal efforts of readers and poets alike manifest in literature? If readers (as literary critics) talked about composting, how would repurposed literature appear in later texts and how would we be able to discern it now? Did poets actually recycle the work of others as described by readers and Monroe? One way to see the effects of poets re-purposing older, “poorer” literature and to understand poetical composting is to measure textual similarity over time.

Computational text analysis is particularly useful for studying textual re-use and composting because it can model the multifaceted connections that span individual texts. Textual re-use or composting can be measured as documents that share a similar composition of words.

The more words that documents have in common, then the more similar those documents will appear. A model of literary composting begins to emerge when textual similarity is measured over time. Measuring word frequencies over time illustrates how dominant forms of literature ascend or descend. These measurements, then, can be useful as a proxy for literary taste.

Scholars have developed a number of methods to track textual similarity and large- scale patterns within corpora. Ryan Cordell and David Smith’s Viral Texts Project models the circulation of popular texts through American newspapers (2017). Katherine Bode similarly finds that “syndication practices” in Australian newspapers reveal “a significantly more complex, varied, and populated array of processes and structures—local and global—than has been

142 appreciated” (101, 2017). Others, like J. Stephen Murphy (2014) and Nathan Hensley (2015), have attended to the central actors who played significant roles in organizing and maintaining large, literary networks. Richard Jean So, Hoyt Long, and Yuancheng Zhu leverage sequence alignment, often used in DNA studies, to track language similarities that are highly repetitive but exhibit slight variations, modeling language as a genome structure. Using a similar method,

Laura B. McGrath, Devin Higgins, and Arend Hintze discern linguistic novelty, the inverse of repetitive language, within modernist novels (2018). Adam James Bradley likewise detects the poetic diction that distinguishes T. S. Eliot as a modernist in contrast to his contemporary,

Georgian poets. Computational projects such as these work to reconstruct historical literary connections at various levels of textuality. Textual similarity can elucidate the various social forces that constitute literary taste because texts that share similar styles or features might also share a similar inspirational source or cultural provenance.

By connecting textual similarity across serialized issues, computational approaches recover the possible lineages of influence, such as the poetical composting Weeks imagines in his letter. Lineages here refer to the diachronic links that are made when newspaper editors clip and re-use texts from other newspapers; actors in a network become nodes through which collaboration and textual dissemination can occur; or, when various writers who are not obviously connected take up and use language in similar ways. Such connections can map out the social and collective efforts that construct literary taste—the forces Tompkins and Weeks mutually acknowledge in their writings. Measuring textuality similarity, then, becomes a method to track literary shifts and, by extension, cultural developments. The patterns of similarity that

143 become more or less frequent signal the consolidation or dissolution of particular tastes, literary prestige, and cultural influence.

To model Weeks’s conception of poetical composting as a mode of textual similarity, I will employ doc2vec—short for document-to-vector. Doc2vec, which I discuss in-depth in the

Methodology chapter, models the semantic complexity of language. Doc2vec, which builds off its predecessor and name-sake word2vec, is able to reconstruct cultural semantics as mathematical formulas. For example, “king” minus “man” equals “queen.” In doing so, doc2vec models the polysemy of words and determines similarity through context.

By modeling influence as textual similarity across time, doc2vec surfaces the collective efforts that sustain literary values—efforts that Weeks and Tompkins identify as key factors in the formation of literary taste.10 Although doc2vec discerns the semantic differences and exchanges between magazines and genres, can it track something as subtle as poetical influence? Once again, doc2vec must peel back another layer of the onion. In order to track literary composting, doc2vec should engage with the influential lines of poetry rather than the influences across different genres.

Figure 1 (below) moves away from the readers’ letters and their discussions of poetry, focusing instead on the poems themselves. The visualization above sketches out literary

10 While doc2vec seeks out the texts that worked to consolidate taste, the computational process also participates in the interpretive practices that sustain literary taste by reshaping texts into data. No computational process is impartial. But, doc2vec works to emphasize a different set of priorities often missed in close reading. Figure 4 molds the texts found in Poetry in a way that illuminates possible influences over time in a mode that resonates with Weeks’s compost metaphor. A process that models Pound’s vision would look different.

144 influences found in poetry.11 The layout of the graph organizes text chronologically with earlier texts on the left and later texts on the right. Each node, or vertical bar, represents a subsection from a poem, designated by labels. The horizontal links indicate when two texts share a significant similarity. The overall effect of the graph is to illustrate a flowchart, showing textual similarity as it moves from earlier texts to later

Figure 1. Trajectories of textual similarity proposed by doc2vec.

11 Weeks’s compost metaphor asserts that mediocre work, while beneficial, was still inferior to the masterpieces of Shakespeares. I do not want to apply qualitative judgments to these authors/ texts or suggest poetic composting works towards some teleological perfection. Rather, I want to hone in on the idea of compost/composting apart from pigeonholing them into an arbitrary hierarchy. Modernist studies has treated each of these authors as minor poets, if treated at all, though Lowell’s status as been on the rise.

145 In Figure 1, parts of poems12 reach out across the graph horizontally connecting to parts of other poems published at later dates. Marjorie Seiffert’s “The Old Woman: A Morality

Play in Two Parts,” for example, links up with a reprint of itself in the Prize Award Number as expected. More interesting than that, however, is the series of connections between Nicholas

Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, and Edwin Curran. Doc2vec proposes that these three writers form a network because they each wrote passages of poetry that share a striking similarity. Before close reading what these similarities are in the next section, I want to pause and unpack the computational suggestions posed by Figure 1 now that no more layers of onion will be peeled off. Figure 1 visualizes lines6 of influence in Poetry, lines that can be interpreted as Weeks’s poetic composting. Influence here is the perceived similarities between texts published at different dates.

The relationships proposed by doc2vec could be misinterpreted as an objectification or reductive reading, wherein the algorithm becomes the principle organizer of all texts within the corpus. But, doc2vec and most computational models provide intermediary insights rather than

12 The data of Figure 1 is modeled slightly differently than the data in the Methodology chapter. Here, the poetry genres, which are bundled together by the MJP’s encoding practices, are broken up into strings of 200 words. Each poetry chunk, then, becomes a fragment of a single poem or, occasionally, a combination of the end of one poem and beginning of another. Chunking poetry in this way seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to capture the idea that poems are composite and have different parts or movements. For example, the beginning of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—“Let us go then, you and I, \ When the evening is spread out against the sky \ Like a patient etherized upon a table”—calls forth different images than the poem’s conclusions—“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea \ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown \ Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” Both passages convey the morose and pitiful mood of the poem, but work towards that mood with different words. The second goal of chunking texts in this way, is to provide doc2vec with enough words to determine the chunk’s semantics—too few words and the process would fall apart. Doc2vec is able to train these 200-word chunks with the rest of the MJP’s text in order to produce a model of modernist semantics.

146 final results. Models gesture towards further work rather than claiming the last word. Using doc2vec to recover poetic influence builds off Lisa Marie Rhody’s work in “Topic Modeling and

Figurative Language” (2012). Although doc2vec and topic modeling differ as mathematical models, both can reveal the “latent patterns in poetic discourses” in order to seek out

“relationships that might otherwise have remained hidden.” As Rhody rightly points out, computational models work as methods of discovery, enabling researchers to find threads of similarity in a larger scale of texts. Such models stop short of explaining the text and, instead, provide the “interpretive space” where literary criticism begins.

The latent patterns and interpretive spaces that stitch these poets together props up a set of affiliations in what Wai Chee Dimock calls a “multiply symptomatic field, a case of infectious hosting and being hosted” (738). In her essay “Weak Theory” (2013), Dimock offers this new symptomatic field as an alternative to “sovereign theory,” in which “the field of cultural production” is “an “arena centrally and invariably organized by dominant forms” (733—734).

The totality of “sovereign theory” asserts that each part or instance of a cultural field operates as a microcosmic manifestation of the entire field. Each cultural unit, no matter how it is partitioned

(poem, novel, genre, author), becomes a witness of the entire field. “To insert any work into such a field,” Dimock argues, “is rather like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—a completable task with preassigned limits.” Such theories necessitate a global, finite, and tessellated understanding of culture, wherein a poem’s multivalent layers collapse into a singular, inescapable interpretation. Dimock, then, experiments with a literary history that falls outside of such theories.

147 For Dimock, the webs of relationships between texts—such as the one woven by doc2vec—unsettle “sovereign theory.” She reframes interpretation within localized, non- hierarchical, and nonlinear possibilities. These “site-specific” interpretive platforms generate “a variable morphology, a variable ordering principle, so that what appears primary in one locale can indeed lapse into secondariness in another” (738). Doc2vec’s proposition of Lindsay, Lowell, and Curran asks readers to reconsider their secondariness within the canon. As Dimock argues,

“the frequency, diversity, and centrifugal nature of the spin-offs,” such as this non-canonical trio,

“suggest not only that the points of contact will change from moment to moment but that the field itself might not even be governed by a single morphology, an ordering principle generalizable across the board and presetting its hierarchies. Local circumstances can do a lot to change the operating baseline and the various claims to primacy resting upon it” (737). The legacy of High Modernism, a network of Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, continues to hold primacy in modernist studies even as the field actively looks elsewhere (Collier 2015). Dimock’s

“Weak Theory” provides a mode of analysis that can unsettle the endurance of High Modernism by looking for connections that, at first glance, seem weaker. Doc2vec searches for textual similarities, which can be leveraged as new localities from which to re-read “mediocrity” within modernism.

Doc2vec recovers a version of Weeks’s composting metaphor. Textual similarity serves as a proxy for repurposed and borrowed literary devices and language. Tracking these similarities over time illustrates the ascension of significant interests with Poetry’s community. Rather than focus on the now high-profile poets that composed the modernist canon, doc2vec draws attention to the literary forms that propagated (and their non-canonical creators) throughout Poetry’s run.

148 Weak Aggregations of Weeks’s Compost

Doc2vec proposes weak connections between Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, and Edwin Curran, inviting a close reading predicated on their supposed similarities. At first glance, though, each poem seems very different. Lindsay’s poem portrays a wild party in a sleepless city. Lowell’s hybrid genre of interspersed prose and poetry is set in a quiet living room with a small boy playing with toy soldiers. Lastly, Curran’s poem takes place in an African jungle and illustrates two lions fighting over prey. The different settings of these poems indicate that doc2vec is locating their similarities at a different level of textuality. By turning to close reading, we can more fully examine what connects these poems and restore their complexity. If their similarities are modulations of the same semantic space—that is, their similar use of language signifies towards the same poetic conceit—then close reading how these similarities manifest will show how the same idea develops over time and how language adjusts to cultural changes. Close reading takes up the weak connections that tie these poems together, asking whether their similarities extend to more complex levels of literariness. The following close readings will focus on the passages that doc2vec identifies as similar.

Lindsay’s “The Fireman’s Ball” (July 1914) describes a boisterous ballroom that appears to catch fire as the musicians and dancers party into the night. When the conductor ups the tempo of the band, the flames stretch higher up the walls of the building. The poem depicts a ballroom engulfed with modern, jazz-like revelry:

Listen to the music

Of the fireman’s ball—

Listen to the music

149 Of the fireman’s ball.

“’Tis the night of doom,”

Say the ding-dong doom-bells.

“Night of doom,”

Say the ding-dong doom-bells.

Faster, faster,

The red flames come (pp. 125—126).

Music mixes with cityscape noises, a siren, and the blaze. Lindsay’s repetition provides a rhythm and pace that matches the scene, until a warning briefly interrupts it. As the poem concludes, another voice speaks. Lindsay introduces this new speaker with a Buddhist proverb from the first

Khandaka of the Mahāvagga. The Mahāvagga describes the awakening of Gautama Buddha’s ten disciples. In Lindsay’s poem, this new voice warns of the destructiveness of vice, “Wine is fire…

Hate is fire…Life is a flame” (p. 130). The poem ends with a fire engine loudly interrupting this teaching as it tries to rescue people from a burning and collapsing building. Lindsay’s poem celebrates the wildness of joy and music but eventually questions the delirious drive that leads to possible destruction. The poem ends uncertainly poised between the violence of unregulated pleasure and the lively joy captured in such abandon.

Amy Lowell’s “Lead Soldiers” (September 1915) also pairs a consuming fire with music but begins with a much quieter setting. In her poem, Tommy plays with toy soldiers in the nursery. She begins with a description of the fire next to him:

The nursery fire burns brightly, crackling in cheerful little explosions and

trails of sparks, up the back of the chimney. Miniature rockets peppering the

150 black bricks with golden stars, as though a gala flamed a night of victorious

wars (269).

The scene here is much calmer than Lindsay’s erratic jazz-party, but the similarities of the two poems start to emerge. Lowell depicts the fire as a “gala,” providing the first comparative link back to “The Fireman’s Ball.” After the description of the nursery, Lowell transitions to poetry as

“Tommy’s soldiers march to battle, / Trumpets flare and snare-drums rattle.” The military instruments that appear in this passage likely occupy the same semantic space as Lindsay’s diction in “The Fireman’s Ball,” explaining why doc2vec sees a connection between the two poems.

Surprisingly, though, Lowell and Lindsay’s comparisons continue. Although “Lead

Soldiers” begins calmly in a nursery, Lowell imports scenes of real violence in Tommy’s game.

As Tommy leads his soldiers into a battle he cannot comprehend, his toe catches the “leg of the wash-stand, and jars the pitcher” (274). Tommy fails to catch the falling pitcher, and it “crashes to the floor. But it is not water which oozes to the door. The stain is glutinous and dark, a spark from the firelight heads to it red.” In a surrealist mode, the water turns to blood and drowns the toy soldiers on the floor. Like Lindsay’s poem, Lowell subverts the apparent playfulness with unexpected violence. Here, Lowell undermines Tommy’s game of soldiers by aligning it with military violence and self-destruction. These comparisons likely go beyond doc2vec’s model, which is limited to 200-word chunks rather than the entire poem. Tommy’s fall and the Buddhist caution appear outside the passage that doc2vec links together. And yet, as the poems continue later passages reinforce their shared themes and motifs.

151 In yet another strange convergence, Lowell and Lindsay both evoke orientalist figures to provide a dissonant counterpoint. In “Lead Soldiers,” a kitsch figurine, the “nodding mandarin,” overlooks the scene as the poem progresses. The figure with “blue-green eyes” stares into “the air, and he nods—nods,” with calmness. Apparently unfazed by the room filling with blood and perhaps expecting it, the figurine continues nodding even when his “rose is broken,” and falls into the “black blood” (274). Lowell and Lindsay employ Orientalism to provide a knowing sobriety to their otherwise violent scenes. While doc2vec provides the hooks that connect these two poems together, close reading restores their literary complexities, which further solidify their likenesses.

Edwin Curran’s “The Lions” (November 1921) continues doc2vec’s proposed lineage of similarity. According to the notes provided by Poetry, Curran was a telegrapher who lived in

Zanesville, Ohio. He self-published two small collections of poetry, some of which appeared in earlier issues of the magazine. “In spite of their modest backing and poor typography,” the notes report, “[both collections] have attracted a good deal of notice from critics of authority” (115). It is possible Curran as not received any critical attention at all. But, doc2vec recommends his poem as the third piece within this literary trajectory.

Rather than city ballroom or nursery, Curran’s poem is set in a lush, shadowy jungle that “glistens like a cloud— \ Purple-cool, tree-deep, lake pearled” (p. 59). Significantly, there is no literal fire in Curran’s poem like there is in Lindsay’s and Lowell’s. But, in its place, there is a lion imbued with the same color palette. The lion “runs like a tawny flame— \ Swift yellow stroke of lightning there.” It is likely that doc2vec recognizes these colors as belonging to the same semantic space. The lion, portrayed as a fire, unsurprisingly recalls other words related to

152 fire in the doc2vec model of language. Even in the dark, green setting of the jungle, the lion’s spark provides the semantic link to other poems that evoke fire. Additionally, Curran imagines the supporting actors in the lion’s jungle with music:

Parrots gaudy as a star

Tap their bells and chatter sound.

Each insect sweeps his dim guitar

Like music hidden in the ground (p. 60).

Although Lindsay’s, Lowell’s, and Curran’s poems create different images, their separate passages combine fire imagery and music. Doc2vec considers this pairing to be semantically distinct. Other poems might draw similar images with either fire or music, but doc2vec understands both together as a unique semantic space that each poem occupies.

Again, there are more similarities beyond those that doc2vec finds. Like Lowell and

Lindsay, Curran’s poem also depicts violence. Curran’s portrayal resonates with Lowell’s more though, because he invokes national warfare and the World War. “Behold, one lion leaps for his prey,” Curran writes, “As savage nations in our day \ Pound on some weak antagonist” (p. 59).

Curran’s African jungle serves a literary function similar to Lowell’s “nodding mandarin” and

Lindsay’s use of the Mahāvagga. Each poem invokes the Other while considering human violence. The Other becomes an instrument of empathy or sobriety, providing a foil to the violence. The smaller animals that are trampled or scared off by the lions’ battle provide the empathetic counterpoint in Curran’s poem. Curran’s “The Lions” continues the themes found in

Lindsay’s and Lowell’s poem but modifies them slightly. These modifications can be read as part of a literary field’s transformation, due largely to World War I.

153 Doc2vec collects passages with fire imagery interlaced with music descriptors. These weak connections serve as platforms for further examination, highlighting stronger complexities and similarities. Read together, these three poems illustrate a progression of violence that drifts from local scenes, such as Lindsay’s city or Lowell’s nursery, to global settings, as in Curran’s

Africa. This thematic progression across these three poems tracks with the progression of World

War I, with Curran addressing the war most explicitly. Doc2vec’s weak connections, however, are significant because they offer a way to track Weeks’s and others’ conception of poetic composting. Each poem highlights the development of similar themes and literary palettes over a seven-year span. While they do provide bridges to the literary complexities of each poem, they are also links to previous poems and accentuate the aggregation of literary taste.

Literary complexities, such as themes, historicity, and theory, are the predominant mode of literary analysis but are also its limit. Close reading does not attend to certain kinds of knowledge, specifically the prevalence of literary forms and their propagation elsewhere. Close reading tends to high levels of abstraction that crystalize literature, fastening texts to specific and often unchanging structures. Focusing on the high-level complexities of literature draws out the limitless nuances of a text, but it also silos each work. Texts fold into themselves and wait for theories to subsume them. As Dimock argues, “sovereign theories” or modes of reading centrally control the possibilities of interpretation. The focus on higher levels of textuality constrain literary analysis as much as they enable it to explore texts deeply. Ultimately, the abstract levels of textuality pull attention away from the routine practices of writers, which can elucidate the fluidity of literary production.

154 While lower levels of textuality, like diction, can serve as a shuttle to the complexities of a text, they also provide markers of literary change. Even Pound, who imagined the city as a tool to prevent imitation, valued previous writers for providing inspiration. He recommends pulling from other writers because “the modern painter recognizes the importance of the palette” and “can but make out one's own spectrum or table” (“The Renaissance,” 228). He then lists various Greek, Latin, French, and Old English writers to draw from. Virginia Woolf also imagined literary production in terms that parallel Weeks’s composting metaphor. In “Men and

Women,” she understands art as an attempt to “try the accepted forms, to discard the unfit, to create others which are more fitting” (195).13 Amy Lowell’s lecture series reflect her interest in literary transformation. As Melissa Bradshaw writes, “Lowell fought to transform [literary standards of the general public]” as opposed to Pound who “fought the standards of merely

‘popular taste’” (145). It is not surprising, then, that readers searched for continuities between writers as well. Circulation could compound literary taste but literary production could also dismantle taste by diverting attention elsewhere.

Doc2vec links poems together when they share a similar palette. Attending to lower levels of textuality as they develop across time, provides a platform for other methods to understand how styles and techniques change. Computational text analysis excels at seeking out similarities for more complex comparisons. Furthermore, if styles reflect cultural priorities as

Tompkins argues, then tracking textual changes also elucidates how taste and even larger

13 Although Maren Linett argues that a rhetoric of eugenics seeps into many canonized writers who sought to “make it new” and replace the “unfit” with the “fit” (2019, 2), the rhetoric of transformation does not rely on a framework of eugenics in the readers’ letters, such as Weeks. The greatest works of art, a debate that can never be settled, relied on the egalitarian efforts of many readers and writers regardless of their literary status.

155 structures of culture change as well. Following these changes over time shows how cultures build up ideas and values through repetition, aggregation, and consolidation.

Conclusion

Weeks and other readers praised mediocrity and proposed a theory of literary production, arguing that poetry was a communal process that matured through literary composting. Literary values emerged within a dynamic and collaborative system of cultural production. Doc2vec helps recover this composting by rendering literary production as a web of weak connections composed of semantic similarity. Once doc2vec aggregates many weak connections together, close reading restores their complexities and elucidates the stronger, thematic connections that bind poems together beneath their surfaces.

Doc2vec paired with close reading together shows how the weak connections formed by textual similarity can consolidate and scale up to form literary taste and cultural capital. The similarities that continue throughout literary production correspond to literary taste, which is rewarded with publication. At the same time, though, textual similarities can fade away indicating that literary values have similarly changed. Scaling different levels of textuality in this way puts weak theory and strong theory in conversation with each other. Dimock uses weak theory to hold off sovereign theories that dictate the terms of interpretation, allowing new connections to form. But, in doing so, weak theory also closes itself off from the structural powers that so often reproduce themselves. Tompkins, on the other hand, draws attention to these structural powers that, under the guise of literary excellence, reward some authors and not others.

By moving through different levels of textuality—diction, semantics, themes, and taste—a hybrid method of computational and close reading tracks literary taste as it consolidates or

156 dissolves over time. The weak connections that accrue over time suggest the accumulation of cultural capital. Moving from weak connections to strong theories elucidates the moments when a cultural environment shapes literature and vice versa.

Pulling together readers and seriality prompts literary criticism to attend to the temporality of cultural capital. Harriet Monroe’s belief that the “great audience” offered artists a

“reciprocal relationship” indicates that many facets go into cultural creation. Within any single poem, many voices coalesce. If letters to the editor call attention to new timelines and new actors of literary production, then the question of literary criticism cannot only ask what dominant forms of literature are present. Literary criticism must content with who or what keeps it there?

How are dominant forms of literature made durable or weakened? How does cultural capital change hands? To engage these questions, criticism must contend with different scales of analysis and work to understand how provisional, coincidental, even accidental literary similarities can transform into strong structures of cultural capital and literary prestige. Cultural studies should continue to interrogate the dominant forms within literature but must also ask who or what allowed those forms there in the first place.

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162 Surface Socialism: Incompatible Readers in The Masses

Introduction

Often called “the most dangerous magazine in America,” The Masses was a radical socialist magazine published out of Greenwich Village from 1911–1917. The magazine featured national and international news on socialism and the cooperative movement. As the masthead eventually read, The Masses was a “Revolutionary not a Reform Magazine.” The editors frequently defended the magazine’s unapologetic criticism and revolutionary attitude in court. In

The Masses’ final year of publication, the United States government accused the editors’ pacifism of undermining American war efforts by hindering military recruitment. The censors finally revoked the magazine’s mailing rights after years of trying to block the magazine.

While many socialist and radical magazines established a similar antagonistic posture,

The Masses was unique because it drew from visual commercial culture and advertising. Thomas

Seltzer, the magazine’s first editor, declared that the magazine would be “a general

ILLUSTRATED magazine of art, literature, politics and science” (1). By fusing socialism with advertising tactics, The Masses sought to convert the largest possible audience. The magazine offered “the best artists of the country, on a quality of paper that will really produce them...a luxury which the Socialist press hitherto has been unable to afford.” Bad illustrations poorly reproduced, Seltzer argues, “are worse than worthless” because they “cause an unpleasant irritation in the optic nerve, which by sympathetic action is communicated to the entire nervous system.” Good illustrations, on the other hand, produce the opposite effect and will make socialism more appealing to a broader audience. Max Eastman, who took over as editor in

December 1912, re-affirms this goal when he writes, “We are going to make The Masses a

163 popular Socialist magazine—a magazine of pictures and lively writing” (3). In The Masses, the socialist revolution and advertising could co-evolve and transform one another—commercial culture would make socialism appealing to a national audience.

But, as World War I inflated the costs of print production, The Masses struggled to continue publication and was forced to merge with The New Review in August 1916. The New

Review was also a New York-based socialist newsletter and the marriage should have been amicable. The primary difference between the two publications seems to rest in their stance on

“agitation.” Piet Vlag, founder of The Masses, argued that “This highly centralized and closely organized co-operative movement can only be created by steady, insistent agitation and education” (1911, i). Meanwhile, the inaugural editorial of The New Review claims, “The New

Review will be devoted to education, rather than agitation” (1913, 1). Even though The Masses had built its success by fusing antithetical concepts such as socialism and advertising, combining with a like-minded organization ironically produced too much tension to keep the magazine afloat. Readers of both magazines aired their grievances in The Masses Review, accusing the other of being politically compromised.

The contentious merger of two counter culture magazines prompts questions about cultural evolution. What about these two magazines was unacceptable to the other? Why were their differences intolerable? As Michael Rozendal argues in “An Engaged Mass Audience? The

Provocations of a Popular Front Slick, Direction,” The Masses was “an exploration of the formal resources of the popular magazine” that combined socialism and “a boundary-crossing engagement with mass-market codes” (202–203). The New Review, in stark contrast to the advertising codes of The Masses, was more traditional in its presentation of socialism. It is

164 possible to their disagreements are a manifestation of a deeper commitment to or complicity with socialism or capitalism. Perhaps, readers of The New Review understood the marketing codes of

The Masses as capitulation. But, reading these texts suspiciously and seeing a repressed historical materialism behind these differences misses most of what these magazines have in common. Structural explanations, then, seem to fail because readers are separated by only a minimal ideological distance (if any) and housed within the same magazine. In other words, they share the same ideological structure, which makes it a weak explanation for their differences.

Instead of seeing structural reasons for the incompatibility between readers, it seems that their differences rested on the surface of their texts.

Recovering the readers’ opinions of the merger makes visible the ways that the surfaces of texts are able to activate taste and aesthetic difference rather than deeper structures.

For many readers, the magazines’ merger represented the collision of pedantic and popular socialism. Readers translated this collision in terms of age, which became an accusation to lobby against the other readers of the magazine. Tracking references to age illustrates how weak, surfaces differences can mobilize social difference and taste as effectively as strong, ideological differences.

Attending to The Masses during its merger elucidates the cultural work of textual surfaces and the ways that styles can compete without necessarily drawing upon ideology. In

“Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best argue for an alternative to the hermeneutics of suspicion that are prevalent in literary studies. They specifically call for

“surface reading,” in which the surface does not conceal repressed or hidden meanings as it often does within close reading. Instead, surface reading takes “texts at face value” (12). In looking at

165 the surface of texts, rather than beyond them, there is a recognition that as much as texts conceal, they also reveal and “that the moments that arrest us in texts need not be considered symptoms, whose true cause exists on another plane of reality, but can themselves indicate important and overlooked truths” (18).

After the merger, the readers’ complaints focus attention on “overlooked truths” of style within socialism. By drawing attention to motifs (and accusations) related to age, readers’ letters elucidate the politics that emerge from the surface of texts, rather than their ideological depths. The merger of The Masses shows how two planes of textuality, the surface level presentation and the ideological base that underpins it, are capable of working independently, and, therefore, begs the question: which layer moves which?

Readers’ Discontent with Merger

When the Masses announced its merger with the New Review, Max Eastman self- consciously anticipated the backlash. “The Masses has grown up,” he writes, “And it isn’t our fault” (August 1916, 5). The staff tried to “keep it young and unintellectual” but “of course you can’t prevent a thing from growing.” Eastman frames the coming change in the magazine as the

“inevitable products of evolution.” While some aspects of The Masses are unavoidable evolution, other aspects could be controlled. Eastman asks for reader feedback, seeking their advice on how to proceed with their socialist publication.

In the September 1916 issue, readers of The Masses wrote to complain. Irwin Granch, in a letter entitled, “Plea for Divorce,” writes:

I HATE the new Masses...It is fit only for incurable Marxians and college

instructors to read. It is not for the masses any more...Now you are trying to

166 throw away this effectiveness...I hate this complaceny [sic] about having

grown up because you have shut humor and irony and noble, realistic art

away in a corner from “thought” (41).

In a similar vein, Mary W. Ovington—likely the co-founder of the NAACP—calls for the two publications to separate. She believes readers of The Masses must be saying the last issue is “the stupidest I’ve ever seen” while The New Review “readers must feel as though their steady old car were hitched to a hydroplane.” She ends her letter, “Do untie the knot!” Readers of The Masses lament the loss of youth after the merger. The perceived change in style and tone appeared as an abandonment of the magazine’s irreverent but lively origins. The old, stuffy style of The New

Review would sap The Masses of its appeal.

Readers of The New Review were also disappointed. They mirrored the complaints of the other readers and accused The Masses of being young and immature. Paul H. Douglas writes,

“The New Review was performing valuable service” but joined to The Masses “it is lost in the welter of sex literature and illustrations” (November 1916, 22). Even worse than “turn[ing] the stomach of the healthiest,” The Masses was “merely sentimentalists in revolt.” The magazine’s juvenile attitude, Douglas accuses, “repel[s] everyone who is seriously at work” and “furnish[es] conservatives with much excellent material.” Despite their shared ideology and acknowledgement that “the profit system” is “vicious,” Douglas cannot ally himself to the youthfulness of The Masses, which he sees as undermining the co-operative movement’s efforts.

A few months later (February 1917), another reader similarly accuses the magazine’s immaturity of impeding socialist progress. Although The Masses “advertises itself as a

‘revolutionary’ magazine,” Frank Stuhlman argues,

167 it falls for the trickery of a cheap, middle-class trimmer like

Wilson...Revolutionists! They are but a lot of commonplace boobs who play

with great words and then swallow line, bob and sinker at the first cast, with

the mighty thin bait of a few meretricious and contemptible bourgeois

reforms! They roar like lions and vote like “suckling doves” (42).

Stuhlman challenges the authenticity of the magazine’s ideology. The Masses plays with “the great words” of socialist thinking without fully comprehending or committing to the cause.

Stuhlman takes up the recurring critique of the magazine’s immaturity by comparing readers of

The Masses to “suckling doves”—children playing at politics.

Stuhlman’s letter moves through the paces of symptomatic reading. He reads past the advertised revolution on the surface and sees bourgeois reform beneath. His critique, however, seems excessive because the magazine, at this point, was in court battling against censorship for its radical politics. Stuhlman’s skeptical reading, then, illustrates how textual surfaces and styles can activate politics rather than simply conceal them. Stuhlman situates The Masses as a reformist magazine because of its youthful attitude. By linking youth to ineffectual reform,

Stuhlman assigns a new political charge to the magazine’s style.

For readers of both magazines, the merger was similar to a bad January-May plot: doddery, slow socialists united with young, ineffectual socialists. The division between The

Masses and The New Review was not rooted in different ideologies, however. The incompatibility of the readers roiled on the surface of the magazine. The style, tone, and presentation became the site of conflict. For a community of socialist readers, the ideology was neither hidden nor denied. The youthfulness of The Masses became a contested topic.

168 Modeling Surfaces

Close reading that seeks to uncover the ideology of readers’ letters actually misses where the readers’ incompatibility lies. The source of readerly conflict appears on the surface of these texts. Unlike close reading, computational text analysis highlights the surfaces of these texts and, therefore, reveals how the magazine resolved or failed to resolve readerly disputes.

Topic modeling effectively works to track the changing interests and priorities within serialized publications. The goal of topic modeling is to return significant topics, or the subject matter of documents. Topic modeling The Masses foregrounds the contested issues that became explicit and appeared more frequently.

Within The Masses, topic modeling registers significant shifts in the magazine’s content.

169 Figure 1. A visualization of terms related to World War 1 effectively displace “socialism” terms around 1916.

For example, Figure 1 shows a significant shift in language that occurs on the onset of World

War 1. As the topic related to socialism declines (“people class working workers movement economic socialism socialist”), the war topic ascends (“war people germany peace german country american”). The changing trends of these topics indicates the obvious: the war became a prevalent topic in the magazine. But, when these trend-lines are read alongside texts, it becomes clear that it is not a case of simple subtraction and addition.

170 In “What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary

Scholarship?,” Ted Underwood and Andrew Goldstone argue that topics within a discourse community might seem to decline due to language naturalizing. Rather than topics simply disappearing from discourse, writers convey those same topics with fewer words. Certain keywords signal concepts where once longer prose was necessary. The topic that captures socialism likely naturalized because it starts to dip two years before the onset of World War I.

The naturalization of a topic, signaling the same concept with fewer words, allows that topic to mutate.

The Masses continued to discuss socialism but conveyed socialist ideals through pacifist dissent. The document in The Masses with the highest proportion of the war topic is “On Giving

Aid and Comfort to the Enemy” by H.K.M. (July 1917, 37). Significantly, this text describes the value of pacifism as an international movement akin to socialism. The short opinion article begins by describing the “American autocrats who seek to conscript everything from lives to opinions.” The autocrats say, “Every American pacifist is worth a company of soldiers to

Prussia.” The article defends the pacifist, and the magazine itself, against the idea that pacifism was harmful to American war efforts. The example of the war topic shows how the topic model register language shifts over time.

Another significant shift in the magazine’s language occurred after the merger of The

Masses and The New Review, revealing that the debates in the readers’ letters reverberated throughout other genres as well. As readers accused each other of being either juvenile or doddery, topics related to age and criticism rise.

171 Figure 2. A visualization showing that terms related to youth and criticism rose after the 1916 merger.

After the 1916 merger, the topic related to criticism and youthfulness rose sharply. Readers’ letters in particular began using words like “young” and “good” more frequently than at any prior point in the magazine. The “youth and criticism” also becomes as prominent as the war topic. Although the topics include words like “young” and, in another, “old,” these topics are categorically descriptive. Instead, topics indicate which documents take up language that relates to age. These documents do not necessarily discuss age explicitly or directly.

172 While the youth aspect of this topic is significant, it is also a topic that marks criticism with words like “good,” “writing,” and “writer.” The emergence of this topic indicates a shift away from a consensus, where this topic does not need to appear, towards a debate, where it becomes necessary to make such categories and claims. Reading these topics within the framework of readers’ letters suggests that debates about writing became intertwined with descriptions of youthfulness.

Figure 3. A visualization showing that terms related to age and poetic, figurative language also rose after 1916 merger.

173 Age also makes a prevalent appearance within poetry after the merger. Similar to the “youth and criticism” topic in letters, age also becomes an important topic in poetry. Figure 3 shows a significant uptick of age as a topic, which includes words like “little,” “love,” “old,” and “song.”

Although “old” appears as a keyword in this topic, other words that are highly ranked likely signify youth, such as “spring” and “flowers.” The interest in age—whether as a motif, subject, or accusation—extends beyond readers’ letters.

The topic model illustrates how contested issues played out on the surfaces of texts over time in serialized publications. As readers accused each other of being too immature or doddery, the words related to age accumulates. This accumulation reflects the evolving nature of surfaces in print culture. As Heather Love argues, following Paul Ricouer, “Interpretation is defined by a tension between demystification” and “the ‘restoration of meaning...Depth is also a dimension that critics attempt to produce in their readings, by attributing life, richness, warmth, and voice to texts’” (387–388). Although Love argues for modes of reading other than suspicious, she understands that interpretation, even symptomatic reading, is equally revelatory and generative. Critics produce textual richness, or meaning. The generative nature of reading extends to historical readers as well. The accumulation of age shows how the surface features of texts accrue meaning over time when stretched out across seriality. The topic model, therefore, makes visible the temporal dimensions of language and the evolutionary nature of language at least within this particular magazine community.

The topics of age were present throughout the magazine’s run. But, when the styles of

The Masses and The New Review collide, those same topics morph. The collisions of these magazines changed language. Although both groups of readers were ideologically close, their

174 differences were nevertheless incompatible. Perhaps, if the magazine had continued, the readers might have resolved their differences.

Artistic Evolutions

The tensions of evolution and change were ever-present in The Masses. In the inaugural issue, Thomas Seltzer defines the magazine as “an outgrowth of the co-operative side of Socialist activity” and “[a]s the sphere of [socialist] activity extends and its means of propaganda increase,” he argues, “it automatically evolves new organs of expression.” As mentioned, Max

Eastman would re-iterate the evolutionary nature of the magazine in his introduction as editor.

The evolutionary aspect of the magazine seeps into the literature that appears within its pages and the artists who contribute. Comparing works of art from before and after the merger elucidate the evolutionary path of the magazine.

The cartoonists in the magazine’s first issue embodied the youthful agitation that readers of The New Review would find immature. Art Young, who quickly became a celebrity-like figure along with the other illustrators, provided one cartoon title “Evolution.”

175 Figure 4. “Evolution” by Art Young, January 1911.

The cartoon portrays an optimistic transformation of society, culminating with the outcast of capitalism by a simple kick of the people’s shoe. Each panel advances another phase of capitalism until the people’s ultimate victory. The rather straightforward message is emblematic

176 of the confident certainty and agitation of the magazine. Magazine readers would eventually read this kind of attitude as a signal of youthfulness.

In the same issue, Grace Potter interviews various cartoonists, including Young. Potter begins by asking Young simple facts about “the story of [his] life” but almost immediately changes course noting, “A man must be dead at least fifty years before we can take a human interest in these dry facts of his early life” (11). The false start is a tongue-in-cheek jab at tradition and suits the overall irreverence of the magazine. As the interview continues, Potter describes Young’s artistic purpose as “the most virile and yet child-like simplicity.” Even his responses at times are “concluded naively.” Rather than indicating that Young’s naivety is bad, however, Potter argues that Young’s youthfulness is his strength.

Potter’s description of Young’s work captures the general attitude of the early Masses, a style that would eventually irritate some readers of The New Review. After the merger, the magazine tries to balance its “child-like simplicity” with a more serious tone familiar. Poetry, in particular, mirrors the two sides of the magazine post-merger.

Unlike Young’s cartoon with its self-assuredness, Florence K. Mixter’s “Elegy” (July

1917) laments the loss of youth. The speaker reminisces: “There is one Spring; / One April of delight; / And all the rest is but remembering / One moon-lit night” (36). The speaker warns young listeners, “never think the white hawthorne can dwell / With you for long.” The poem eulogizes youthful memories. The somber nostalgia marks a shift from the magazine’s beginnings. Old age comes surprisingly as “White petals fall / Bewildered at your feet; / And

Spring makes of the whitest flower of all / A winding sheet.” The poem’s theme—nostalgia for lost youth—becomes charged when read against the backdrop of readers’ complaints and the

177 contest over style. Age acts as a signal to the different sets of readers. The subdued sadness of

“Elegy” might have been assigned to the style of The New Masses, and it is easy to hear readers of The Masses, like Irwin Granch, say, “I hate this complacen[c]y about having grown up.”

Mixter’s poem, then, provides a metaphor of growing old to signal to The Masses that it is time to grow up and leave behind its immature socialism.

Immediately following, however, another poem provides a counter-theme. In “The

Old-Fashioned Garden” by Florence Ripley Mastin, the speaker and a companion seemingly intrude on a pastoral scene filled with “budded peonies / Exchang[ing] fine secrets” and “Silken gowned / Poppies idly sip[ping] the sun” (37). The quiet scene matches the traditional sonnet form until a “blackbird walks and cocks his head / As though he said: ‘I’m favorite here, / ‘And motorists may not come near.” The crow suddenly interrupts the idyllic scene and becomes a parody of a curmudgeon. The implication that motorists are loud and intrusive parallels readers’ complaints against The Masses, like Frank Stuhlman’s critique that the magazine “roared like lions” (42). But, “The Old-Fashioned Garden” satirizes the curmudgeonly bird who ironically disturbs the idyllic scene while the supposedly loud motorists, the speaker and companion, bring out the garden’s beauty and liveliness. Similar to “Elegy,” characters in the poem become allegories of oppositional readers. The readers of The New Review, like Stuhlman, are cast as cantankerous and the motorist are lively.

Mastin’s and Mixter’s poems offer competing commentaries on a split audience, charging age with a political expression. Each poem, read in light of the readers’ letters, reveals a contest for style. The political values of the poems are conveyed through motifs of age. In Slow

Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues

178 that poetry in the socialist, radical press “constitute a distinctive textual form within this context in that their approach to poetic tradition does not always accord with the political values of radical journals. Tradition, revolution, and form intersect and struggle in this domain” (170). But, within The Masses this struggle was not between different ideologies.

Conclusion

The merger of The Masses and The New Review illustrates how political competition can emerge from the surface of texts, rather than their ideological depths. As Mark Morrisson argues in The Public Face of Modernism, counterpublic spheres often struggled to sustain coherency without enforcing assimilationist ideals. He argues that the “perennial problem in the

American left” centered on “how to accommodate ethnic difference within a class revolution,” which had specific “ramifications for the Masses, which fought against earlier ideals of assimilation and homogenization of culture” (170–171). Ironically, however, it was the assimilation of another socialist magazine that produced much of the magazine’s tension in its later years.

The politics of the surface play out amongst the readers’ letters and the magazine’s poetry. Tracking how language around age changes before and after the merger highlights the fault lines of its audience. The independent layers of textuality, the surface and depth, do not always reflect one another, and these textual planes can often work towards different, even contradictory, ends.

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