Parallel Session 13.

Chair: Gábor Dobó

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Meghan Forbes

Printing on the “periphery”: The intersection of art and technology in the interwar Czech avant-garde

The most influential avant-garde group in interwar Czechoslovakia, Devětsil, called for a social revolution enacted at the printing press. Founded in 1920 and comprised of leftist artists, architects, actors, and poets, the group undertook an ambitious publishing effort, aiming to reach urban individuals on the street and in their homes in the years following the First World War. For the 10th International ESPRit Conference with the theme of “Periodicals Beyond Hierarchies,” I propose to present research from my forthcoming book manuscript – Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print – to advance a discussion of the ways in which the technical print capabilities of the day intersected with a radical artistic vision, a topic that has rarely been engaged in either the English or Czech-language scholarly context. To this end, I will focus on some keystone serial publications, such as Disk, Pásmo, and ReD, to chart across a variety of media Devětsil’s evolving approach to what we might consider the lost -ism of the European interwar avant-garde: Poetism. Coined by Devětsil, this became the organizing principle of the group’s practice and was expressed through poetry, photomontage, performance, and theoretical essays. I discuss how the visual expression of Poetism was made possible through the adaptation of newly available print technologies, a connection that has not received expert, technical attention despite the fact that Devětsil has been canonized within Czech art history and literary studies (thanks in part to the writings in Czech and English of Anděl, Bydžovská, Knobloch, Pomajzlová, Pravdová, Srp, Šmejkal, Toman, Witkovsky). More broadly, my work over the past decade has touched on the themes of center and periphery, with an aim towards deconstructing these very concepts, as by turning our focus to the so-called margins, so many such nodes come into focus that no center meaningfully exists. In the Czech context, I argue that a more nuanced view of avant-garde artistic production is but one missing link in achieving a fuller, de-centered view within the field of the European interwar avant-garde.

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Nora Ramtke

Recirculation, index, supplements: Material aspects of the periodical making of Europe (1835–1844)

The proposed paper concentrates on material dimensions and paratextual strategies of the ‘making’ of Europe in periodicals through the German magazine Europa (issued monthly by August Lewald 1835–1844). The paper aims not only at tracing the representation of European countries marked as ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’ within the periodical, but reflects, moreover, on the mediality and materiality of the periodical’s imagination of Europe as a community, drawing on Benedict Andersons’ concept, but thinking of it in terms of mediation across geopolitical centres rather than of nation building . The periodical’s title, Europa, Chronik der gebildeten Welt  (‘Europe, Chronicle of the Educated World’) has a strong programmatic dimension and is permeated with Eurocentric thinking. It appealed to an educated, socially, and financially privileged urban audience that defined itself as part of a European society: “it is no longer time for society to be organised in a different way in every small corner of the world and to preserve in this isolation a peculiarity that is neither enviable nor pleasing” (Advertisement 1835). This centralising and ultimately hierarchising impetus is mirrored in the way the periodical is organised paratexually, by means of its geographically structured index which lists the articles by country from Portugal to Turkey, from Hungary to the Nordic countries, but starting always with Germany, France, and England. Furthermore, the success of Lewald’s Europa is based on translations from different European magazines as well as the transnational recirculation of supplements such as fashion plates, lithographies, or sheets of music, providing the material basis for the ‘making of Europe’, as I will argue.

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Zoltán Szénási

Materiality and making meaning: The publication history of Mihály Babits’s Fortissimo

The interdisciplinary openness of Periodical Studies enables us to apply the results of other fields of studies in our research. The common feature of the metaphilological trends of the last few decades is to appreciate the materiality of text, and to emphasise the material aspects of text in the making of meaning. (Cp. bibliographical code by Jerome McGann and the periodical code by Brooker and Thacker, or Philpotts.) In my lecture, applying the methodology of historical bibliography, I examine how the changing material context of Mihály Babits’ poem Fortissimo influences the poem’s interpretability from the first stage of its existence to its re-publication in the volume. The publication history of Fortissimo is exceptional from several perspectives. The March 1 issue of the journal Nyugat was confiscated in 1917 because of the poem and prosecution began against the author. Afterwards, the poem was published in French, still in 1917, and in two anthologies in German the following year. Fortissimo became available in Hungarian again only after the Aster Revolution in the volume entitled A diadalmas forradalom könyve (The Book of the Triumphant Revolution), and a few days later in Nyugat again. My lecture thus exposes the opposition of Centre and Periphery from two points of view: on the one hand, I introduce the control of political power over literary journals through the functioning of censorship; and on the other, describing the role of the material carrier in the making of meaning queries the central position of old ideal concept of Text.