The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.
Stefan Collini from The Times Literary Supplement:
“The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of new or little-known writers of talent.” There is an appealing modesty about this brisk declaration, even a kind of impersonality in subordinating editorial ego to the larger good; it seems likely to provoke a murmur of agreement, not least from new or little-known writers. But this is not, of course, the only way in which the function of such publications may be conceived. The editor of one of the many new literary periodicals established in the 1920s announced a no less definite sense of purpose in quite other terms: “I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion”. The goals expressed in these two quotations are not necessarily in conflict: editors might, it is true, maintain “critical standards” in a practical way by identifying new literary talent. But the tendency is for the pursuit of these two purposes to result in periodicals of rather different types. One, often thought of as the classic “little magazine”, largely carries new poetry and fiction, mostly by as yet unrecognized writers, often exemplifying a style of writing that is self-consciously, even determinedly, insurgent and unfashionable. The other, committed to upholding the critical or reviewing function, is largely filled with essays and book reviews, taking in the literature of both the past and the present, as well as taking in more than literature; it aspires to shape intelligent opinion and to combat the slackness and puffery of mainstream literary journalism. More…
A piece from TheNational:
For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, a chieftain who rallied his fellow tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. But this founding national myth, cherished by Romantic poets and Nazi ideologues, was banished from memory in the postwar era. As Hermann-mania returns to a wary Germany 2000 years after his victory, Clay Risen considers the search for national identity in a post-national age.
Atop a forested hill a few kilometres outside the sleepy west German town of Detmold stands a 19-metre high statue of Hermann, the Germanic chief whose forces annihilated nearly 20,000 Roman legionnaires at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Gazing toward the French border, the copper statue, wearing a jaunty winged helmet, holds an upraised sword, whose blade bears the inscription “German Unity is my strength, and my strength is Germany’s power”. More…
Liesl Schillinger at The New York Times:
In the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky — a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities — began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. Seven of them appear in “Memories of the Future,” a selection of his fiction that takes its title from the book’s longest entry — the tale of a brusque monomaniac who builds a “timecutter” to eject himself from 1920s Moscow. None of these stories were published in Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. This was not because the work had been rejected or because it was, well, a little weird. Krzhizhanovsky, it seems, was too proud, too shy or (more likely) too frightened to show them around — given that he was spinning his dystopic fictions at about the same time that Stalin was collectivizing the Soviet countryside. More…
An essay by Damion Searls from The Quarterly Conversation:
Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful.
It differs from the old Aestheticism, “art for art’s sake,” in that it no longer believes in Art as a sake either, as a holy cause. New Aestheticism is art for people’s sakes. It is not antisocial; it aims to please. It is elitist but not discriminatory, for it is open to any and all who care to love it.
MFA programs teach the craft of plot or of poetic epiphany, and a pared-down, smooth style that seems embarrassed of beauty. The dictum to show not tell has led downward to darkness, from, say, Madame Bovary and The Sun Also Rises to a prose that is all shown, that walks on ice in socks: all surface and no depth, like TV at its worst. Quote examples here. But I cannot bring myself to write an ode to dejection.
Nor can writers today draw their aesthetic calling from the visual arts, as Barbara Guest did from Matisse, Frank O’Hara from de Kooning, Rilke from Rodin, . . . Museums have turned away from beauty toward a misdirected populism whose logic Proust refuted 90 years ago already (the people, not the elite, he argues, are the only ones intelligent enough to appreciate so-called-elitist high art; in terms of content, it is plumbers who want to read about princesses, just as much as princesses want to read about plumbers). In truth museumgoers go, when they go, for art, not for pandering and exhibits of billionaires’ speedboats. More…
Only A God Can Save Us: Heidegger, Poetic Imagination and the Modern Malaise by Henk J. Van Leeuwen is now available from The Humanities imprint.
In the shadow of a looming global environmental catastrophe humanity is at an unprecedented crossroad where crucial and difficult decisions must be made about how we are to live. This book questions where the desire for certainty and mastery is taking us and argues that reliance on technology and information alone cannot avoid an ecological catastrophe. It attends to an existential poverty of spirit that, it suggests, is at the root of contemporary problems. It tackles the association between a metaphysical void, with its growing sense of meaninglessness, and the ecological predicament.
While many find the consolations of traditional religion increasingly untenable, a hunger for a spiritual dimension in life persists. In a rare excursion, yet one which continues the uniquely human search for a transcendent ground of being, the book explores an unfamiliar kind of thinking which shelters and liberates the poetic imagination that counters the modern malaise. In a scholarly yet accessible account van Leeuwen uncovers from Martin Heidegger’s middle/late philosophy an extraordinary pathway of transformative thinking where this imagination is nurtured.
Continue reading ‘Only A God Can Save Us’
