Chair: Zsuzsa Török
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Levente T. Szabó
The first International Journal of Comparative Literature as little periodical: Early radical Eastern European Modernism and the emergence of comparative Literary Studies
The multilingual Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1877–1888) is one of early comparative literature's most fascinating and puzzling phenomena. Founded by two Eastern European polyglots, edited in Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg and London, the first review specialized in the emerging comparative literary discipline succeeded in attracting around 120 collaborators worldwide. This broad linguistic and cultural appeal made the journal the perfect frame for the most diverse and radical methodological questions, experiments, and opinions. The transnational experiments and the radical methodologies of the ACLU reframed the idea of center and periphery, national and cosmopolitan in the heydays of nineteenth-century modern nationalism and national literatures. By positioning the Eastern European-based first international journal of comparative literary studies among the little magazines of modernism, my presentation proposes an interpretation of early transnational literary modernisms that includes radical forms of early multilingual comparative literature. As a pioneering literary little periodical, the ACLU could thus be treated not only as an essential part of early comparative literature but would be able to challenge the role attributed to the Eastern European periodical press in global literary modernism.
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Marianne Van Remoortel, Lise Foket and Christophe Verbruggen
Periodical Studies beyond hierarchies: Teaching periodical poetry with Madoc
In our paper, we will talk about our experiences teaching periodical poetry using a new open-source digital annotation and crowdsource platform called Madoc. Commissioned by three projects in the US, UK, and Belgium, Madoc allows individuals and institutions to assemble, enrich, and showcase digital objects. In November‒December 2021, we met with five students of the Flemish interuniversity Advanced Master’s in Literary Studies programme for three-hour weekly sessions. We introduced them to periodical studies and recent scholarship on periodical poetry, and taught them how to use Madoc to locate and analyse poetry in a digital archive of the fortnightly Belgian-Dutch feminist-socialist periodical De Vrouw (Woman; 1893‒1900). The students collaborated to identify all poems (over 200 in total), developed a distinct capture model to describe the poems, and each conducted a case study of their own in Madoc. Madoc uses IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework): instead of working with locally stored digital copies of De Vrouw, we retrieved the full digitised run through URL requests (using a IIIF API) from the digital collections of the Belgian Amsab-Institute of Social History. As we continue to teach this course over the following years, we can easily import more IIIF periodical collections into Madoc for other students to work on, as well as create new projects using the already enriched collection. Moreover, using the Madoc API, the IIIF periodical collections can be easily exported, re-used and displayed in other IIIF applications. Open-source IIIF-based platforms like Madoc, we will argue, have the potential to transform the way we research and teach periodicals. To use the vocabulary of the 2022 ESPRit conference: they enable us to overcome some of the key “centre”/“periphery” dichotomies that shape periodical studies as a field. Not only do they allow us to bring together and share digitised periodicals from geographically discrete physical collections; they also open up opportunities to set up collaborative research projects and teaching initiatives in periodical studies with colleagues across Europe and beyond.
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Hubert van den Berg
Centres & peripheries: On the problematic of a popular distinction in Avant-Garde Studies
In the past decades, it has become a popular figure of speech and a common distinction in studies mapping the historical avant-garde between “centres” and “peripheries”. But does it indeed make sense to do so? As a derivative of the socio-economic and political “dependency theory”, already its – metonymic – application to a by and large European phenomenon, which the avant-garde was, raises doubts. As a historiographic-narrative hierarchization, the distinction is obviously akin with elder similar distinctions between “metropolises” or “capitals” and “provinces”, based partly on the assumption that large cities were the essential habitat of the avant-garde, partly on the undeniable clustering of avant-garde groups (and presses) in cultural market places like Paris and Berlin. Yet,
- as far as the avant-garde in its antagonism to established/hegemonic agencies, actors and institutions in the cultural field was a qualitate qua marginal (and as such “peripheral”) phenomenon in its historical manifestations (not least in printed form, given the often minimal print run of magazines): does it make sense to distinguish centres and peripheries, in what in itself was already a periphery (and in cities like Paris and Berlin vanishingly small grouplets?
- Was urbanity, were metropolises indeed the essential habitat of the avant-garde? Zurich, in the 1910 still a concise provincial town – as the cradle of Dada, a townlet like Leiden as the “centre” of De Stijl in its first phase, the shores of the Kochelsee as the habitat of the painters of Der Blaue Reiter, Moravia as a major region in the Czech avant-garde suggest otherwise.
- And in the case of avant-garde journals: they might have been edited and produced on certain (but in many cases, e.g. of De Stijl after 1922, changing) locations. Yet, to what extent was this location relevant, given the fact that in many cases both most of the contributors and most of the readership were living and working elsewhere in Europe (and beyond), not to speak of exile/émigré journals published on one location, but aiming at a readership elsewhere?