Modernist Periodicals and Pedagogy: An Experiment in Collaboration

“A review is not a human being saving its soul, but a species of food to be eaten,” writes Ezra Pound in 1930, underscoring a magazine’s function as an item for consumption (697). His emphasis on material products (rather than great minds) presages by decades the shift in modernist studies from a focus on individual genius toward an accent on modernity as a complex cultural milieu. As Sean Latham and Robert Scholes observe, periodical studies has emerged as a crucial field, requiring not only new methodologies for research, but also new approaches to teaching (517–518). Magazines offer students a glimpse of the diversity and chaos of modernism, revealing litera-ture’s entanglement in the commerce of everyday life. With the expansion of digital archives such as the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), periodicals have become a more accessible teaching resource — a tempting item to serve to students of the “Net Generation,” who prefer web-surfing to trekking over to the library. This essay will lay out theoretical grounds for teaching modernism with magazines, discuss practical applications, and offer a case study of an experimental undergraduate seminar. Collaboration, I conclude, is key to periodical pedagogy.