In the United States, a little magazine is a magazine genre consisting of "artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses", according to a 1942 study by Frederick J. Hoffman, a professor of English. While George Plimpton disagreed with the diminutive connotations of "little", the name "little magazine" is widely accepted for such magazines. A little magazine is not necessarily a literary magazine , because while the majority of such magazines are literary in nature, containing poetry and fiction, a significant proportion of such magazines are not. Some have encompassed the full range of the arts, and others have grown from zine roots.
46-472: The Seven Arts , an early example of the little magazine , was edited by James Oppenheim , Waldo Frank , and Van Wyck Brooks ; it appeared monthly from November 1916 through October 1917. Jointly envisaged by Oppenheim and Frank, The Seven Arts was an attempt to anticipate and influence the United States' emerging “renascent period;” in the first issue the editors explain: “In short, The Seven Arts
92-460: A dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch " (1939), Clement Greenberg said that
138-524: A little magazine include a 5-by-8-inch (13 cm × 20 cm) format, a two-color cover, and a semi-annual or quarterly publishing schedule. Literary magazines that do not qualify as little magazines for these reasons include Oxford American and the Lindhurst Foundation 's Doubletake , measuring 9 by 12 inches (23 cm × 30 cm), having complex four-color covers, and having bi-monthly publishing schedules. "Integral to
184-471: A party in Greenwich Village ; Frank, who had many literary contacts, would serve as associate editor and find contributors for the magazine. Oppenheim would serve as editor, and by this time, had already met Annette Rankine, who agreed to finance the magazine. Rankine had no influence over editorial decisions, but when her family pressured her over the magazine's increasingly hostile attitude toward
230-549: A post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and
276-491: A revolt against Victorian materialism . Little magazines were significant for the poets who shaped the avant-garde movements like Modernism and Post-modernism across the world in the twentieth century. Originally printed with traditional methods such as offset printing , the publication of little magazines saw a "mimeo revolution" in the 1960s with the advent of the mimeograph , which significantly reduced magazine printing costs. An example of this that also illustrates
322-534: A skill that their amateur editors generally lacked. English professor Bes E. Stark Spangler traced four main phases of the postbellum pre-World War Two little magazine in the South. Immediately after the Civil War they mainly covered Southern topics and the works of Southern authors, changing at the turn of the 20th century into more critical views of Southern letters and life by new young scholars, becoming voices for
368-525: Is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism": Peter Bürger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the "institution of art" and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors. According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky , modernist composers from the early 20th century who do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist composers who do not fall into
414-638: Is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In The Theory-Death of
460-413: Is not a magazine for artists, but an expression of artists for the community.” Of the many contributors to the magazine, Sherwood Anderson , J. D. Beresford , Randolph Bourne , Theodore Dreiser , Robert Frost , Kahlil Gibran , D. H. Lawrence , Amy Lowell , Paul Rosenfeld , and Louis Untermeyer were among the most prolific. The idea of The Seven Arts was first conceived by Oppenheim and Frank at
506-546: Is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde ." Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term
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#1732801482185552-615: Is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives , Igor Stravinsky , Anton Webern , Edgard Varèse , Alban Berg , George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Henry Cowell (in his earliest works), Harry Partch , John Cage , Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pauline Oliveros , Philip Glass , Meredith Monk , Laurie Anderson , and Diamanda Galás . There
598-520: The Atlanta Review for example reporting in 1997 that it received 12,000 submissions for every 100 pieces published. Avant-garde In the arts and literature , the term avant-garde (from French meaning ' advance guard ' or ' vanguard ' ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art , and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to
644-492: The Kenyon Review Robie Macauley opined that such magazines "ought to be ten years ahead of general acceptance". Ezra Pound observed that the more a magazine values profits, the less it is willing to experiment with things that are not (yet) acceptable to a mainstream readership. It has been argued that little magazines that are associated with universities are not truly encompassed by the term, but
690-678: The Vanderbilt University Group. Other influences for the Southern Renascence were The Lyric and The Nomad , both of which had brief lifetimes in the 1920s. As young writers from Vanderbilt, the Double Dealer , and others later took up postings in other universities, they would in turn found or edit other magazines, Crowe going on to edit The Kenyon Review , and Ransom together with Cleanth Brooks to found another (1935) Southern Review . In
736-592: The intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues 's political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of
782-529: The 1882–1887 Southern Bivouac , which was one of the last little magazines to be devoted to the Lost Cause . The second phase, which was a reactionary movement amongst young scholars in Southern colleges and universities that was critical of the South, and which was discussed in the contemporary essays of John B. Hennemann, is exemplified by William P. Trent's 1892 Sewanee Review (which Hennemann
828-497: The Avant-Garde ( Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia , 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement. Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians . In Theory of
874-473: The Avant-Garde ( Theorie der Avantgarde , 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment 's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]". In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for
920-697: The Avant-Garde (1991), Paul Mann said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the culture industry . Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu , in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), said that Western culture entered
966-464: The South in the last three decades of the 20th century, from Apalachee Quarterly in 1971 through The Chattahoochee Review in 1980 to Five Points in 1997, still devoted to the core little magazine subject of literature, including short fiction, poetry, book reviews, and creative non-fiction. As The Land We Love did in the 19th century, 20th-century little magazines still received vastly more unsolicited literary contributions than they published,
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#17328014821851012-590: The U.S.’s involvement in the First World War , which culminated in The Seven Arts ’s acerbic August 1917 issue, she withdrew her support and killed herself shortly thereafter. All three editors contributed material to the magazine; Oppenheim wrote several poems and editorials for The Seven Arts , although his most significant achievement may have been organizing the superb, but potentially discordant contributions that continually came in: “I took hold of
1058-534: The advent of modernism in the 1920s, and finally in the 1930s entering into the debate over the future economic prosperity of the South on the side of agrarianism , having heated debates with what they viewed as Southern "liberals". Examples of the first phase, which were a significant factor in keeping the genre of Southern letters alive for the two decades after the Civil War, include Daniel H. Hill's 1866–1869 The Land We Love , which widened its readership by including agriculture and military history alongside
1104-407: The artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of
1150-458: The artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of mass culture , because the avant-garde functionally oppose the dumbing down of society — be it with low culture or with high culture . That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch , simulations and simulacra of Art. Walter Benjamin in
1196-418: The arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms. In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms , such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries. In art history
1242-406: The blessed thing and each month studied our available material carefully, composing the next number somewhat as if I were composing a symphony or painting a picture: there had to be balance, homogeneity, a something that united the whole, an ensemble effect that was pleasurable.” Randolph Bourne, perhaps the most brilliant contributor to The Seven Arts , certainly its most coherent voice criticizing
1288-416: The category of avant-gardists include Elliott Carter , Milton Babbitt , György Ligeti , Witold Lutosławski , and Luciano Berio , since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience." The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman , Sun Ra , Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . In
1334-416: The cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society . In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed the matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to the cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and to consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview . In The Theory of
1380-469: The definition of the little magazine", according to scholars Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz, is penury . A later 1978 study by the (then) editors of TriQuarterly magazine described little magazines as putting "experiment before ease, and art before comment" and noting that "[t]hey can afford to do so because they can barely afford to do anything; as a rule they do not, and cannot, expect to make money". Hoffman considered them to be avant-garde , and editor of
1426-464: The devious approach to financing is Keith Abbot. He published Blue Suede Shoes when he was a graduate student at Washington State University , stealing a box of mimeograph paper from the university and borrowing a mimeograph machine from a friend. In the 1980s a similar revolution occurred as the photocopier superseded the mimeograph, further reducing costs as the availability of commercial photocopying services by companies such as Kinko's obviated
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1472-514: The essay " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura ) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which
1518-949: The final phase, both established magazines like Sewanee Review and the new 1930s little magazines debated whether the South should remain agrarian or embrace industrialism. Also in the 1930s they were associated with New Criticism . Sewanee Review is now the oldest Southern literary magazine, with other long-lived magazines dating from the 20th century, including Southwest Review (1915), Virginia Quarterly Review (1925), The Southern Review (1935–1942, then from 1965), Georgia Review (1947), Carolina Quarterly (1948), Shenandoah (1950), Nimrod (1956), Southern Poetry Review (1958), Massachusetts Review (1959), Crazyhorse (1960), Southern Quarterly (1962), Hollins Critic (1964), Greensboro Review (1966), Cimarron (1967), Southern Humanities Review (1968), New Orleans Review (1968), and The South Carolina Review (1968). Many little magazines continued to be founded in
1564-551: The literature; W. S. Scott's 1865–1869 Scott's Monthly Magazine ; Moses D. Hodge's and William Hand Browne's 1866 Eclectic (later to be the 1869 New Eclectic after its absorption of The Land We Love and finally changing to Southern Magazine in 1871); De Bow's Review , an ante-bellum magazine revived briefly in 1866; Albert Taylor Bledsoe's 1867–1869 Southern Review ; Mrs Cicero Harris 's 1872–1882 The South Atlantic , which, like The Land We Love , augmented literature with science and art coverage; and
1610-401: The majority view amongst scholars is that they have similar enough purposes, formats, and contents to unaffiliated magazines in the genre that they can be considered little magazines also. Historically, they were both devoted to social issues, literature, or critical inquiry, and edited by amateurs. Little magazine editors can be characterized as in the main idiosyncratic and dissatisfied with
1656-535: The mediocrity of mass culture , which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde
1702-500: The mid-19th century, as a cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realising social change in a society. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge
1748-640: The need for editors (or their friends) to own a mimeograph machine. At the same time, university-sponsored magazines became more prevalent, whereas unaffiliated magazines had dominated the genre before the World Wars . Thousands of little magazines existed across North America by the close of the 20th century, most not fully supporting themselves and subsidized by state or federal grants and endowments from universities, colleges, and foundations, sometimes with unpaid staff. The desire for low-budget publications brought an on-line revolution to little magazines at
1794-593: The rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to
1840-734: The socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s). The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In
1886-648: The status quo. The magazines themselves are in general, but with several notable exceptions, short-lived and do not out-last their founding editors. Editors have adopted ingenious, on occasion devious, means to finance their magazines, often financing them out of their own pockets. The earliest significant examples are the transcendentalist publication The Dial (1840–44), edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller , in Boston , and The Savoy (1896), edited by Arthur Symons , in London , which had as its agenda
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1932-504: The third phase saw The Westminster Magazine founded in 1911 and affiliated with Oglethorpe University ; Stark Young's Texas Review affiliated with the University of Texas , which relocated to Southern Methodist University in 1924 and changed the name to Southwest Review under the editorship of Jay B. Hubbard; the 1921–1926 The Double Dealer ; and John Crowe Ransom's and Robert Penn Warren's 1922 The Fugitive published by
1978-475: The turn of the 21st century. Firstly embracing blogs , they have diversified to Twitter , Facebook , and many other on-line publication channels. The on-line revolution also raised possibilities for content in the form of podcasts and audio-visual content not possible in a purely printed format. In the U.S. South, postbellum little magazines had non-commercial ends, generally seeking to inform and influence their readers, rather than being marketed for profit,
2024-636: The war, disrupted Oppenheim's “ensemble effect.” Bourne's scathing anti-war pieces for The Seven Arts , “The War and the Intellectuals” (June 1917), “Below the Battle” (July 1917), “The Collapse of American Strategy” (August 1917), “A War Diary” (September 1917), and " Twilight of Idols " (October 1917), were audacious, brave, and discordant. The tensions that Oppenheim carefully balanced each month between artistic expression and political revelation snapped, The Seven Arts collapsed, and one year later Bourne
2070-568: Was dead. Others offered to back the magazine, but the editors were unable to find an agreeable means of sharing responsibilities and power. Historian Casey Nelson Blake writes: “The posthumous idealization of the Seven Arts reflects a widespread sentiment, on the part of its survivors and historians, that the journal was itself part of a ‘potential America’ crushed in the stampede to total war, antiradical hysteria, and ‘normalcy’” (123). Little magazine The traditional characteristics of
2116-571: Was later to edit), which would influence John Spencer Bassett to found the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1902. Both Trent and Bassett were professors, at the University of the South and at Trinity College , respectively, and Bassett in particular was risking his job by publishing, as his magazine directly addressed racial issues in the South and reform, something that his successor toned down, editor Edwin Mims. The early years of
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