Reading Schedule
Pre-Institute Readings:
(PDFs of readings are available through City of Print's Zotero group library)
Secondary Sources:
- Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the
- Beginnings of Our Own Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987).
- Catherine Keyser, Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010)
- De Certeau, Michel, “Walking in the City” and “Spatial Stories” from The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1988)
- Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies” PMLA 121:1 (2006)
- Mark J. Noonan, Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 (Kent State: Kent State UP, 2010)
- Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent State: Kent State UP, 2005)
- Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010)
- Aurora Wallace, Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City (Chicago: Univ. Illinois Press, 2012)
Primary Sources:
- George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (Ed. Stuart M. Blumin; Berkeley: Univ. Berkeley Press, 1990)
- “How to See New York,” Scribner’s Monthly (June 1876)
- William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (Harper’s Weekly, 23 March-16 Nov., 1889) [NOTE: We will be reading and annotating this novel on our website]
Additional Readings by Session:
Monday, June 15
Afternoon Session
Topic: Paper Gotham: New York City as Pulp Mecca
Readings: David M. Earle. “Hemingway in the Pulp Milieu” from All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (Kent State: KSUP, 2009); David M. Earle. “Pulp Magazines and the Popular Press An American Art” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume II: North America 1894-1960, eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Henry Slesar “Monster on Stage 4” (Amazing Stories by, Aug. 1957, Vol 31:8) Illustrated by John Schoenherr.
Suggested Additional Readings: David Greetham, “Truthiness in an Age of Contamination” from The Pleasures of Contamination (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010).
Tuesday, June 16
Morning Session
Topic: Performing Periodical Archival Research
Readings: David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia UP, 1998); “Andrew Hamilton’s Defense,” from A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger (1736)
Suggested Additional Readings: Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Illinois UP, 2012); Edward L. Widmer. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York, Oxford UP, 1999)
Afternoon Session
Topic: The Rise of New York’s Penny Press
Reading: Vincent Di Girolamo, Crying the News: Street Work, and the American Press, 1830s-1930s
Suggested Additional Readings: “Beginnings: Rivalry and Satire” from The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, eds. Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz;Fanny Fern in “The New York Ledger” (website); Paula Kopacz, Feminist at ‘the Tribune’: Margaret Fuller as Professional Writer.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1991: 119-139); “Sitting on a Volcano” from Lincoln and the Power of the Press, Harold Holzer (NY: Simon & Shuster, 2014)
Wednesday, June 17
Morning Session
Topic: Visual Culture in 19th-Century New York Periodicals
Reading: Janice Simon, “Imaging a New Heaven on a New Earth: ‘The Crayon’ and Nineteenth-Century American Periodical Covers.” American Periodicals. 1:1 (1991): 11-24; Carrie Tirado Bramen, “The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization,” American Quarterly, 52:3 (Sept. 2000): 444-477.
Suggested Additional Readings: Isadora A. Helfgott, “Art in Life” American Periodicals 20:2 (2010): 269-294; Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988); Richard K. Popp, “Making Advertising Material: Checking Departments, Systematic Reading, and Geographic Order in Nineteenth-Century Advertising” (Book History, Vol. 14, 2011, 58-87); Baird Jarman “The Graphic Art of Thomas Nast: Politics and Propriety in Postbellum Publishing.” American Periodicals 20:2 (2010): 156-190; Bernard Reilly, “Comic Drawing in New York in the 1850s” from Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825-1940.
Thursday, June 18
Morning Session
Topic: The Representation of Labor in New York Periodicals
Reading: Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); George H. Evans “The Working Men’s Declaration of Independence” (Working Man’s Advocate, 1829)
Suggested Additional Readings: Linda J. Lumsden, Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917 (Kent State: KSUP, 2014); Matthew Schneirov, Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893-1914 (NY: Columbia UP, 1994); Carolyn Karcher “Frances Wright of the Free Enquirer: Woman Editor in a Man’s World” in Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, ed. Sharon M. Harris (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004)
Afternoon Session
Activity: Site visit of Herman Melville’s New York
Readings: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Putnam’s Monthly, Nov. and Dec. 1853),“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tarturus of Maids” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, April 1855) and “The Two Temples” (rejected by Putnam’s); Graham Thompson, “The "Plain Facts" of Fine Paper in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” American Literature, 84:3 (505-532); Vanessa Meikle Schulman, “Making the Magazine”: Visuality, Managerial Capitalism, and the Mass Production of Periodicals, 1865-1890” American Periodicals, 22:1 (2012) 1-28.
Suggested Additional Readings: Hans Bergman, God in the Street: New York Writing: From the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995; Ezra Greenspan,George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park: Penn State UP, 2000); Barbara Foley “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s ‘Bartleby’” American Literature 72.1 (2000) 87-116. Thomas Augst “Melville, at Sea in the City” in The Cambridge Companion to New York Literature (NY: Oxford, 2010).
Friday, June 19
Morning Session
Topic: The Evolution of Nineteenth-Century New York Newspapers
Reading: Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent State: Kent State UP, 2005); Elizabeth Jordan, “Ruth Herrick’s Assignment,” Cosmopolitan August 1894.
Suggested Additional Readings: Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature, Kerry Soper,“From Rowdy, Urban Carnival to Contained, Middle-Class Pastime: Reading Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid and Buster Brown” Columbia Journal of American Studies 4:1 (2000); Bonnie M. Miller “The Spectacle of Disaster: The Explosion of the USS Maine” from From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (Amherst: UMass Press, 2011); Mark Twain, “War Prayer” (rejected from Harper’s Bazaar)
Afternoon Session
Activity: Site Visit of Park Row and Printer’s Square
Readings: Stephen Crane, “Experiment in Misery” New York Press, April 22, 1894; Theodore Dreiser, "A Touch of Human Brotherhood," Success Magazine (March 1902); Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; David S. Reynolds, “Walt Whitman’s Journalism: The Foreground of Leaves of Grass,” (in Literature and Journalism: Inspiration, Intersections, and Inventions from Ben Franklin to Stephen Colbert, ed. Mark Canada. London: Palgrave, 2013, 47-67); “The Saturday Press” from Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians, Justin Martin (NY: De Capo Press, 2015)
Suggested Additional Readings: Damon Runyon, “The Defense of Strikerville” McClure’s (Feb. 1907); Willa Cather, “Behind the Singer Tower” Collier’s Magazine (May 1912)
WEEK TWO
Monday, June 22
Morning Session
Topic: New York Modernism in the Magazines
Readings: Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Introduction) and “Modernism in the Magazines” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. McKible “’Life is Real and Life is Earnest’: Mike Gold, Claude McKay, and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” American Periodicals, Vol. 15, no. 1, (2005), pp. 56-73 and “Beauty in Slaughterfold” from The Space and Place of Modernism. Christine Miller “Tongues Loosened” in Modernism/modernity. Selections from Others and The Masses.
Suggested Additional Readings: Mark S. Morrision, “Pluralism and Counterpublic Spheres: Race, Radicalism, and the Masses” from The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin UP, 2001); Ten Poems by William Butler Yeats in The Dial; William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings in CONTACT; “Carnet de Voyage” Wallace Stevens in The Trend; Willa Cather, “Coming, Eden Bower!” Smart Set (August 1920)
Afternoon Session
Activity: Site visit of Gramercy Park and Union Square
Readings: Carole Klein, Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury (Athens: Ohio State UP, 1987); Linda Leavell, “Sojourn in the Whale” from Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995), pp. 10-56.
Suggested Additional Readings: Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (NY: Henry Holt, 2000); Bonnie Costello, “The Armory Show, the Paterson Strike, and Poetry Magazine Bring an Artistic Revolution to the Public” ” in A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009) 526-530.
Tuesday, June 23
Morning Session
Topic: Contending Voices/Mixed Communities: New York’s Immigrant Press
Reading: Peter Conolly-Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895-1918 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 2004); Abraham Cahan, “The Autobiography of an American Jew: The Rise of David Levinsky” McClure’s Magazine (July 1913).
Suggested Additional Readings: Susan L. Mizruchi, Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915; Brad Evans, “Howellsian Chic: The Local Color of Cosmopolitanism” ELH, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), pp. 775-812. Abraham Cahan, “The Rise of David Levinsky” (McClure’s Magazine)
Afternoon Session
Topic: Visioning and Re-Visioning the Harlem Renaissance in the Afro-American Press
Readings: Fire!!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists; Carla Kaplan “A New Literary Journal Announces Its Mission: ‘Burning Wooden Opposition’” in A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009) 593-598; “Harlem Renaissance Studies Now,” Modernism/modernity (Spring 2014), edited by Adam McKible and Suzanne Churchill.
Suggested Additional Reading: Penelope L. Bullock, The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838-1909 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981)
Wednesday, June 24
Morning Session
Topic: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture
Reading: Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010); Dorothy Parker, “From the Diary of a New York Lady” (The New Yorker, March 25, 1933)
Suggested Additional Readings: Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (London:Duckworth, 2000); Rodger Streitmatter, “Demanding Wider Access to Birth Control Information: Margaret Sanger” from Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America (NY: Columbia UP: 2005)
Afternoon Session
Activity: Site tour of the Condé Nast Building and Exploration of its Archives (4 Times Square)
Reading: Christoph Lindner, “Skylines” from Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism, and the Visual Arts, 1890-1940 (NY: Oxford, 2015).
Suggested Additional Reading: Michael Lesy “Life Begins” in A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009) 714-719.
Thursday, June 25
Morning Session
Activity: Tenement House Tour of Lower East Side
Afternoon Session
Activity: Site Visit of the East Village
Readings: Daniel Kane, “The Aesthetics of the Little” from The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: Univ. Berkeley Press, 2003): 57-123; Selections from The Village Voice Reader, ed. Daniel Wolf (Grove Press, 1963).
Audio: “Passing Stranger” (http://eastvillagepoetrywalk.org/about.html)
Suggested Additional Reading: Louis Menand, “It Took a Village: How The Voice Changed Journalism” New Yorker (Jan. 5, 2009)
Friday, June 26
Morning Session
Topic: Teaching New York Periodicals in the Digital Age
Readings: Sandra Roff, “From the Field: A Case Study in Using Historical Periodical Databases to Revise Previous Research” American Periodicals 18:1 (2008); Matthew G. Kirschenbaum “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments” ADE Bulletin (no. 150, 2010).
Suggested Additional Reading: Matt Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012)