‘Transocean’: transition's anachronistic zeitgeists

Abstract

Transition was among the largest of the ‘little’ magazines. Editors Maria and Eugene Jolas translated a wealth of European texts into English, housed Joyce's ‘Work in Progress’, and staged their ‘Revolution of the Word’. Claiming nothing less than a total overhaul of the standardized forms of American journalese, they embraced what they saw as a mystical, transformative power in experimental writing. Such a mission is easily mocked. Critics have long derided transition as delusional, apolitical, and – significantly – anachronistic. Jolas frequently published old material as part of his vision, which reached American readers as new. He also deployed journalistic techniques, baited critics, and orchestrated transition's eventual ossification as a bibliophile's treasure. Rather than judge the project against its more ‘authentic’ counterparts, this essay takes these editorial contradictions as a point of departure, framing a central ‘anachronistic zeitgeist’ as an interpretive strategy with which we might better understand its transatlantic, ‘transoceanic’ history.