Newspapers and Periodicals: Endless Dialogue

Abstract

From individual examples of popular reading, such as were discussed in chapter three, we move to what has often been viewed as an even more commodified cultural object: the newspaper. And here we might recall that Benedict Anderson refers to the newspaper as “the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity,” and that, in some respects, it is merely an “ ‘extreme form’ of the book,” its logical extension rather than, as some feel, its opposite (Anderson, 34). The very definition of dailiness (as opposed to the transcendent values of real literature), the newspaper is often seen as an anonymous farrago of unrelated items, either a major contributing factor to the interpretive vertigo that besets life under modernity or, at best, offering a middle-brow consensus evaluation that fails to take account of the significant contradictions of modernity under what Anderson terms print-capitalism. In Ulysses, “Aeolus” is usually interpreted as another center of the Dublin paralysis (“We’ll paralyze Europe”; U 7 628), and the editor’s offer to have Stephen join the “Pressgang” is seen as a ludicrous and insulting temptation to the young poet. But Joyce was far more deeply and consistently involved with newspapers than we usually realize, and the “great divide” of traditionally conceived modernism has made this difficult to see clearly.