“Strange Collisions”: Keywords Toward an Intermedial Periodical Studies

Abstract

In her recent unified field theory of form, Caroline Levine argues for the plural and seemingly contradictory affordances of form--broadly construed--as a methodological key for analyzing the interaction between the divergent scales of language and politics (6). While this work has deeply suggestive implications for all categories of literary study (Levine draws on texts from Jane Eyre to Antigone to The Wire), it seems particularly relevant, given her concern with rhythm and temporality, to the field of modern periodical studies. Levine is interested in the strange collisions (39) that multiple organizing principles, situated and persistent, bring about: Forms will often fail to impose their order when they run up against other forms that disrupt their logic and frustrate their organizing ends, producing aleatory and sometimes contradictory (7). Levine's formulation here has particular resonance for those of us who study the place of the periodical within the broader media field. Recognizing the periodical as representing one medium among many, and indeed the mutual imbrication of the senses in its consumption, or that of any other media product, opens out the analysis of its form to recognize the kinds of effects that Levine describes. Indeed, Julian Murphet has already argued that modernist literary production should be read as a sedimented trace-history of the competing media institutions of the (3), in some ways anticipating Levine's argument about the ways in which institutional rhythms, themselves formal, act on the level of texts (61). Such formal collision, however, is only just beginning to be parsed within periodical studies, and scholarly recognition of its operations has in large part been spurred by, and thus methodologically shaped by, the specific challenges of the digital moment. The question of how periodicals might best be translated to the digital realm is a formulation that perhaps inevitably stresses preservation and the idea of an authentic and discrete original; in other words, it elides previous strange collision in order to stress a single vector of translation. Scholars of new media, on the other hand, have recognized the movement across platforms, or remediation, as perhaps the key feature of the contemporary media ecology; in what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture, contemporary narratives are routinely conceived as from the outset migratory or transmedial. How might periodical scholarship--and in particular periodical scholarship that emerges from literary study--move to recognize similar operations in past media ecologies, and develop a formal vocabulary to address these concerns? (1) I offer here as a starting point reflections, with application to a test case, on three keywords that have already proven to be fertile sites of speculation: ergodic, used to denote text that requires non-trivial reader decision-making; flow, applied to the practices of media continuity; and sociability, or the creation of media occasion. Each of these offers a mechanism for the engagement of the media consumer and thus a link between social and textual forms that can yield insight into transmedial exchange. Test case: the Listener The Listener, the weekly journal founded by the BBC in 1929, represents a particularly useful site for yielding insights into both the competing media (and media institutions) of its historical moment and the formal traces of that competition. Because the journal, launched to legitimize, promote, and reproduce radio content in the form of an upmarket weekly like the Spectator, (2) both thematizes and enacts the strange collision of media forms, it can serve as a revealing limit case for the kinds of interactions that are less overt in other periodicals. In my own previous archivally-based work on the Listener, I have been able to establish the journal's peculiar status between media by tracing through the internal memoranda surrounding its founding the ongoing arguments regarding its mandate and positioning, and the self-contradictions these engendered in its editorial self-presentation. …