As a student — maybe at any age — it’s really hard to determine the end point of an historical movement to understand what followed. This is a concern because ultimately one wants to know what is going on “now”, and what will be next. An example most young writers have to negotiate is Modernism. While “Post-Modernism” seems largely over as an historical theme, understanding the join, as it were, to the so-called Moderns at the end of the 19th and early 20th century is key to at least understanding how Post-Modernism began. And again, what might be next. The logic being if we can never catch up fully to the now we can at least see where things started and project what might follow. But those origins I think are largely illusory, because like most things they were the product of someone and did not evolve spontaneously. History is a long sequence of people interfering with one another.
Two recent examples underscore this for me. The first is a recent article in the TLS on the history of the Modernist journal. Unbelievably, it seems the major writers we recognize and study were all the products of sustained publicity campaigns (pro or con) through a supra-abundance of small literary magazines and journals. I say unbelievably because in our own time of print-on-demand and always-on Web broadcasting it’s hard to imagine an equivalent amount of publishing. We are super-saturated with the chap books and seasonal periodicals of MFA/English departments, but this seems to have been the equivalent case even in the 1850’s with the Pre-Raphaelite and the later Arts and Crafts Movement.
Secondly, a note in NYT about a new online lit mag is further evidence that the already impressive number of Web based or Web supported journals are either not getting enough recognition, or have missed the mark. The success of McSweeney’s shows that creative marketing and management in small publishing can lead to profitability. The broad strokes real-time media approach of Electric Literature from the article may be sufficient to propel it from the small to a larger scale of social success. I guess any transmission that is not limited to paper or old style HTML is worth trying to get attention. We are after all in a new culture of attention-awareness.
So what’s the point? Well, maybe only that historical eras are inventions, and that the products and personalities that these epochs house are themselves maybe creations from long links in a value chain. Remembering that may give one a better perspective of what is ahead for novelty or value. Of course, if we are just repeating the same production tactics with new techniques then I’m not sure what is next.
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