Perspective : cultural contexts, little magazines, and networks
Authors:   , Ewing Chatham B. 
Published: April 2021

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] "This essay has surveyed a broad swath of criticism of little magazines, established both critical and cultural contexts for Perspective, assessed questions of archival evidence, developed a detailed an in-depth history of a Perspective through the eyes of its own creators, considered questions involving how to theoretically understand what happens when reading Perspective, developed a reading of the texts in Perspective, considered the economic realities impinging on Perspective's production, and, in the most important section of the essay, considered the journal as part of a larger network of mid-twentieth century taste in creativity. The answer to Dana Gioia's charges against academic quarterlies has become much larger than the question. And even after this extensive demonstration of the complexity of Perspective, the kind of journal he so bluntly dismissed, his question, if refined and restated more subtly, remains open; however, the question is less open than when I first asked it at the beginning of this essay. There are elements of coterie and closure within the culture of the journal. They just aren't dominant elements. What have I learned? Why do I think this? In the case of Perspective, both Van Duyn and Thurston used the journal to promote creative work that looked to an idea of artistic writing closer to Romanticism than metaphysical poetry. The journal clearly hada strong editorial bent towards selecting narrative and lyric expressed through a clear voice using limited perspective to recast particular experiences. Even more interesting, the critical statements of the editors and their choice of writing for their journal tie together a kind of neo-Romanticism, American Pragmatism and its close relative in literature, the Iowa brand of New Criticism. Pairing Dewey with Wordsworth is one of the great insights that entails from reading Perspective. In terms of canons, the journal creates an artistic space that takes Harold Bloom's notions of reading and personal experience and turns them upside down. Rather than great and timeless works that address questions of identity and the world, we have new write'often obscure attempts to wrestle with newly crafted representations of fresh individual experience. Rather than a sense of history emerging from the texts of past centuries, we have texts with no history that attempt to shape our impressions of the present and future. The works in the journal demonstrate that the editors demanded formal virtuosity, though they were not rigid about form. And the journal has an instructive goal inasmuch as the sequence of these individual works trains the journa's readers in how to consider tools used to craft experience and demands that readers compare series of texts that explore several similar approaches to representing life. Finally, while it seems clear that the range within the journal's particular focus on voice, experience, and formal artistry can be broad, the journal nevertheless deliberately chooses to focus on that particular kind of art and criticism. Another very important part of an answer to Gioia can be found in the work on networks at the end of the essay. What these networks and statistics show is that Perspective most certainly did have a core set of authors, and this set served as a central and frequently published coterie within the journal; upon examination, it is clear that the authors in the central coterie wrote works that closely paralleled the aesthetic concerns of Van Duyn and Thurston. The authors in the central coterie also had greater publishing success than others, and a significant portion of this central group began their writing careers in a creative writing program. But the numbers also show that the central coterie only accounted for 25-30% of the published texts in the journal. That means that more than 70% of the journal's text contained new and rarely published authors, and if that's the case the journal truly was doing its job. Furthermore, many of those multiply published in Perspective came into the network of little magazines with few publications. The journal, in effect, discovered authors from both groups. But the network diagrams reveal additional facts about the journal beyond its function as a tool for discovering new artists. The most interesting part of the network analysis involved noticing the close connections between Perspective, Accent, and The Western Review. Some further inquiry into the ties between these journals is warranted by the associations that a network analysis turns up. And these associations do not represent any answer in and of themselves. Rather, they indicate a strong association that bears investigation using the traditional tools of literary analysis and historical scholarship. The benefit of the method is that a literary historian can sensibly use it to limit analysis on questions about relationships between little magazines by asking them after having already established a connection empirically and inarguably In short, this essay does more than just maintain that Gioia was mistaken. The larger purpose here is to suggest that a great deal of fundamental scholarly work on the little magazines of the mid-twentieth century remains to be done. But there are new tools available now for doing it. If the evidence related to Perspective is any indicator, with further research and attention to the texts of journals like Perspective, we will be better able to understand the nature of mid-twentieth century literary culture and the development and fostering of the artists and publications that shaped the self-understandings of the generations immediately preceding the turn of the twenty-first century."--Conclusion.