Nearly a decade ago, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes ambitiously proclaimed “The Rise of Periodical Studies” in the PMLA, the premier publication that institutionalizes new trends in literary and cultural studies. Latham and Scholes proposed a seemingly radical reorientation in the philological scholarship of magazines and journals: treat them as “autonomous objects of study” rather than just as “containers of discrete bits of information.” And while this approach has provoked significant, if at times polemical response in English and American Studies, the Slavic and East European fields have remained surprisingly silent. Is the notion of periodical studies as a discrete field applicable to our work? Does it differ from the ways Slavists have been analyzing journals for decades? At “Decoding the Periodical,” a workshop at Princeton University in March 2015,2 we explored these questions with participants from fields of history, art history, and literary studies. Our conclusion was an emphatic yes, that periodical studies does offer Slavic new methodological avenues that reveal the dynamism of our specific periodical culture

Natalia Ermolaev

Philip Gleissner

Humanities Commons

January 2016 • NewsNet 11Periodical Studies: Why and How to Re-read East European JournalsNatalia Ermolaev and Philip Gleissner (Princeton U)Nearly a decade ago, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes ambitiously proclaimed “The Rise of Periodical Studies” in the PMLA, the premier publication that in-stitutionalizes new trends in literary and cultural studies. Latham and Scholes proposed a seemingly radical reori-entation in the philological scholarship of magazines and journals: treat them as “autonomous objects of study” rather than just as “containers of discrete bits of informa-tion.”1 And while this approach has provoked significant, if at times polemical response in English and American Studies, the Slavic and East European fields have remained surprisingly silent. Is the notion of periodical studies as a discrete field applicable to our work? Does it differ from the ways Slavists have been analyzing journals for de-cades? At “Decoding the Periodical,” a workshop at Princ-eton University in March 2015,2 we explored these ques-tions with participants from fields of history, art history, and literary studies. Our conclusion was an emphatic yes, that periodical studies does offer Slavic new methodologi-cal avenues that reveal the dynamism of our specific peri-odical culture.The call to rethink how we read Russian and East European periodical literature is timely. For over two cen-turies, not only literary, but political, technological, and economic forces kept the thick journal in a position of influence over readers, critics, and scholars. While in re-cent decades, Slavists following the cultural turn in the hu-manities and social sciences have broadened their scope to include new material, their methods for engaging peri-odicals have largely gone unchanged. Considering the rev-olution in the production, distribution, and consumption of periodical literature brought about by digital publish-ing platforms and today’s global marketplace, new criti-cal approaches are all the more urgent. Periodical stud-ies brings to “traditional” historical-literary analysis the practices of book history and media studies, which offer a new language for discussing the creation, dissemination, and reception of literature. As Jon Stone pointed out in his presentation at our workshop, Slavic periodical studies is in fact a project of negotiating two academic discourses: a more philologically-oriented Russian approach with an American one that has stronger focus on material culture and new media.The workshop participants were asked to engage with this new methodological territory for their works-in-progress talks. They read a set of pre-circulated ar-ticles from periodical studies scholarship outside Slavic posted on our blog, SEEEPS (Slavic, East European and Eurasian Periodical Studies).3 Attention to a magazine’s material and visual components – images, graphics, ty-pography, page design, paper type – was particularly ger-mane for scholars of the avant-garde. Meghan Forbes, for example, in her talk on Czech interwar magazines, dem-onstrated how a particular typographic aesthetic allowed the Devětsil group to transcend linguistic boundaries and impact the international discourse of modernism. Ksenia Nouril, who looked at early Soviet photography maga-zines, argued that nuanced strategies for laying out Alex-ander Rodchenko’s photos reveal how Sovetskoe foto - and early Stalinist culture more broadly - negotiated the legacy of modernism and formalism. Sarah Krive discussed how the juxtaposition of text an image was used in early Soviet journals to create verbal and visual caricatures of Silver Age poets, serving both entertainment and didactic pur-poses.When approached as a cultural form and econom-ic object, the journal reveals itself as a mediator between inclusivity and otherness, using various genre-specific af-fordances for attracting new audiences while maintain-ing a posture of exclusivity. Yelizaveta Raykhlina demon-strated this process at work in early 19th-century Russia, tracing the evolution of “middle-brow” culture through a rhetoric of producers, critics and consumers of journals Severnaia pchela and Biblioteka dlia chteniia. Later in the century, as Colleen Lucey pointed out, advancements in print technology allowed a proliferation of satirical jour-nals and broadsheet weeklies that constructed spectator-ship and visual pleasure through graphical representations of the social and sexual other, particularly prostitutes and courtesans. In interwar Czechoslovakia, as Karla Huebner showed, journals such as Gentleman could promote mar-ginal social and sexual identities as a distinct ideal of a refined urban lifestyle.Our discussion of periodicals across geographical and historical boundaries emphasized their core generic characteristics. Taking the periodical as an “autonomous objects of study” means exploring its unique traits such as periodicity, ephemerality, collective authorship, insti-tutionalized readership, and continual and multiple print runs. Closely related are the concrete logistical challenges of conducting research on periodicals. It is barely feasible to read, absorb, and assess thousands of pages of one or multiple journals’ complete run. The “rise” of periodical studies has therefore been closely linked to the emergence of digital editions and the new methodologies of the digi-tal humanities. Digital archives (such as the Princeton TOCJanuary 2016 • NewsNet 12Blue Mountain Project4 and Brown/Tulsa’s Modernist Journals Project5) not only provide access, they can enable novel kinds of readings through text mining, computa-tional analysis and data visualization. Alex Moshkin’s pre-sentation exemplified this approach: his network graphs of four Israeli-Russian journals - Dvoetochie, Zerkalo, 22 and Ierusalimskii Zhurnal - demonstrated how several hundred authors in this community expressed geographic and linguistic affiliation compared to the magazine’s aes-thetic and ideological position. But, as keynote speaker and art historian Nick Sawicky pointed out, as we create a rich digital corpus of images, texts and datasets of Slavic and East European journals, we must also be conscious of how our interpretive maneuvers adjust in the digital envi-ronment. In his talk, “Avant-Garde Fissures in the Modern Czech Art Press: Traces in the Printed and the Digital,” Sawicky discussed the radicalization of Czech modern art periodicals Volné směry and Umělecký měsíčník, and showed how contemporary understandings of this histori-cal event are mediated by the multiple forms of access to the periodical as an object of study: as printed original; as transcribed, translated, and anthologized text; and in-creasingly as digital facsimile.The proliferation of magazines, journals and newspapers in the last two centuries, and their continued evolution in the digital age, makes the methods of peri-odical studies particularly attractive for evaluating and re-evaluating modern Russian and East European soci-ety and culture. Following the success of our first meet-ing, we plan to keep fostering this community through the SEEEPS website, which will be updated with information about relevant events and publications. We invite all in-terested members of ASEEES to visit our website and to contact us with any questions or ideas for collaboration.Natalia Ermolaev  is the Digital Humanities Project Manag-er at Princeton University; Philip Gleissner is a Ph.D candi-date in Literature, with a focus on Russian and Czech litera-ture and culture of the 20th century, at Princeton University.(Endnotes)1  Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Stud-ies.” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 518.2  For more information on the conference, including abstracts for the workshop presentations, see the SEEEPS website: https://seeeps.princeton.edu/3  See our website: https://seeeps.princeton.edu. A detailed bib-liography can be found here: https://seeeps.princeton.edu/sample-page/colloquium-readings/4  http://bluemountain.princeton.edu/5  http://modjourn.org/Slavica Publishers is delighted to announce the launch of its new imprint, Three String Books, devoted to translations of literary works from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and the other successor states of the former Soviet Union. Our first offering is Boris Poplavsky’s Apollon Bezobrazov, translated by John M. Kopper. Apollon Bezobrazov is a novel by a “recovered Sur-realist.” Making an unchar-acteristic detour into prose in the 1920s, the Russian émigré poet Boris Poplavsky presents a novel that both reveals and rebels against the Surrealist influ-ence of prominent Parisian contemporaries like André Breton and Louis Aragon. The nov-el’s eponymous hero embodies the figure of the urban hippie—the flâneur of French litera-ture—while the narrator, a young Russian, falls under his spell. The story describes in colorful, poetic detail the hand-to-mouth existence of a small band of displaced Russians in Paris and Italy. It chronicles their poverty, their diver-sions, their intensely played out love affairs, and Bezobrazov’s gradual transforma-tion in the eyes of his admiring followers. Abounding in allusions to Eastern religion, Western philos-ophy, and 19th-century Russian literature, the novel also features an experimental mixing of genres that echoes Joyce’s Ulysses, while its use of extended metaphors reveals the stylistic impact of Proust. Not published in complete form in Russian until 1993, Apollon Bezobrazov significantly broadens our understanding of the literature of the interwar emigration.John M. Kopper is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of several articles on Poplavsky, and has published on Tolstoy, Gogol, Nabokov, and Bely.Inquiries and translation proposals should be directed to Managing Editor Vicki Polan-sky, at vpolansky@slavica.com. Three String editorial operations are overseen by the Slavica PublishersIndiana University1430 N. Willis Dr.Bloomington, IN 47404slavica.indiana.eduslavica@indiana.edu[Tel.] 1-812-856-4186[Fax] 1-812-856-4187[Toll-free] 1-877-SLAVICAwww.slavica.comSlavica editorial board, including Russell Valentino (Chair), George Fowler (Director, Slavica Publishers), Craig Cravens (Editor in Chief, Three String Books), Jacob Emery, and Joanna Nizynska. Slavica Publishers announces:TOC

Periodical Studies: Why and How to Re-read East European Journals

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Periodical Studies: Why and How to Re-read East European Journals

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