Staging the Public Sphere: Magazine Dialogism and the Prosthetics of Authorship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Although film is often described as the first new media form of the twentieth century, recent scholarship on the “mediamorphosis” of print at the turn of the twentieth century suggests that we should also be thinking of print as a new media form during this period.¹ Complexly related to both the dazzlingly, distractingly visual cultures of modernity and the world of things, print media are center-stage in the period’s conversations about the possibility of radical democracy in a mass society, the function of the arts in a republic, and the intellectual “health” of modern culture. A point that Patrick Collier makes specifically about newspapers in Britain in the early twentieth century is thus germane to the larger field of transatlantic print media studies that is this anthology’s focus. Newspapers, he writes in Modernism on Fleet Street, were “the most controversial medium of the age of modernism” (1). By 1922 cultural commentators “had been arguing for more than two decades that transformations in British newspapers posed a peril to the nation … [and] that newspapers had declined from Victorian traditions of ‘sober, restrained and responsible journalism’ to an intellectually bankrupt, profit-driven pursuit of ever-increasing circulations” (1). As Collier goes on to note, broader social concerns loom behind such arguments: namely, “in a public sphere dominated by advertising, mass circulation dailies, and pulp serials, [is] continued democratization possible, or desirable? [Does] mass publication produc[e] — or cate[r] to — a public not only inattentive to serious literature but incapable of self-government, increasingly prone to irrational mob thinking?” What is the role of the arts “in a print-saturated, democratic society” in which the “viability of participatory democracy” is fundamentally at question (6)?