Collaboration Creates Resource at Davidson About Modernist "Little Magazines"
The "Little Magazine" team of (l-r) Kristen Eshleman, Suzanna Boylston, and Suzanne Churchill.
|
9/16/2004
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
by Jonathan Crooms ' 04
A professor’s passion for “little magazines,” students’ archival discoveries, and staffers’ imagination and expertise are coming together to create a worldwide academic resource at Davidson. Together they are proving that innovative teaching is not just a faculty matter.
Associate Professor of English Suzanne Churchill said “little magazines” are non-commercial, small circulation, low budget, and often short-lived publications which proliferated during the modernist period of 1910-1945. Modernist little magazines featured political, artistic, and social ideas and commentary that contradicted prevailing mainstream views, and provided avant-garde writers such as T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein with venues in which to express their views when mainstream magazines would not publish them.
Churchill first discovered little magazines as a graduate student at Princeton University studying modernism. She noticed that the works of well-known poets, such as Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, appeared in little magazines next to those of lesser known poets, such as Jeanne D’Orge, Skipwith Cannell, and Emanuel Carnevali. The lack of distinction between the writers helped Churchill realize that she had only studied the well-known authors of modernism, while little magazines revealed an entirely new realm of the movement to her.
“Little magazines helped me understand modernism from a different perspective,” said Churchill. “The modernist movement was a chaotic period of experimentation, invention, wild success, and crazy failure by many men and women, not just a great few.”
She ended up writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the little magazine, Others. She joined the Davidson faculty in 1996, and in the fall of 1999, taught a course she created entitled, “On Lines: The Web of Modernism.” The class examined letters, essays, and short stories, but mainly studied the role of poetry found in little magazines. As part of the course requirements, students performed original research on various little magazines and produced web pages on a site that was designed and constructed by a local business. Churchill saw the assignment as a way for students to learn how to conduct primary research, develop web technology skills, and contribute to the knowledge about these publications.
She was also excited about the creation of an on-line academic resource.
“Because little magazines were low budget and inconsistent, many libraries don’t have them,” said Churchill. “The website was a way to help scholars and students who are interested in little magazines to learn more about them.”
The website did, indeed, attract attention. Churchill received emails from several little magazine scholars, from the daughter of Skipwith Cannell, a modernist poet and friend of Williams, and this past spring, from a gentleman in San Francisco who donated his father’s collection of little magazines to Davidson College. The donation included forty-five issues, nearly a complete set, of Close Up, an avant garde film little magazine, four issues of The Mask, a theatrical magazine, and single copies of The Little Review, which focused on arts and criticism, Poetry, which was dedicated to poetry, and This Quarter, an avant-garde literary magazine.
This fall, Churchill is teaching the course again, working this time with two college staff members—Susanna Boylston of the E.H. Little Library and Kristen Eshleman of Information Technology Services (ITS).
Boylston, who is head of collection in the library, researched and found a microfilm assortment of fifty American and European little magazines, and arranged for it to be purchased for the library. Between the donation of hard copies, and Boylston’s work to obtain the microfilm, the library has nearly quadrupled its collection of little magazines. Boylston also prepared a web page for students in the class, giving them a bibliography of print resources in the Davidson library and links to other relevant electronic resources. During one class period, she introduced Churchill’s students to the original little magazines, and to new microfilm machines which will allow students to view and even download the little magazines to their personal computers.
Instructional Technologist Kristen Eshleman is also helping the class this semester. Eshleman is improving the Web site’s templates, instructing students how to write for the Web, and offering hands-on training with web design. She has also advised Churchill on how best to incorporate the teaching of technology into her own pedagogy.
Churchill said that in her experience, such collaboration between college departments is unique, and expressed gratitude for the staff help. “Innovative teaching doesn’t just come from faculty,” she said. “What’s making this happen is amazing, imaginative, knowledgeable support from other departments.”
The class’s little magazine Web site now contains the history, circulation, dates of publication, editors, and format of fourteen little magazines, such as 291, The Egoist, and The Masses.
Churchill and her nine students are expecting to add more little magazines throughout the semester, establish an academic bibliography, and create an undergraduate electronic journal on the Web site this fall. Each student will also write a research paper, which will be posted in the Web site journal.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,600 students. Since its establishment in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson is engaged in “Let Learning Be Cherished,” a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.
|
