The fifth installment of the MagMods book club reading of Catherine Keyser’s Playing Smart comes from David Earle, Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Modernism and Print Culture at the University of West Florida. He is the author of Recovering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form, about the popular publishing of modernist literature, and All Man!: Hemingway, 1950s Men’s Magazines, and the Masculine Persona, which uses Hemingway and 1950s men’s magazines to explore hyper-masculinity after the second world war. Earle has published on topics as diverse as James Joyce use of the symbol of absinthe in Ulysses for the James Joyce Quarterly, and a history of pulp magazines for The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. He is currently researching images of femininity in the popular periodicals of the 1920s and 30s.
Catherine Keyser fights three long overdue battles in Playing Smart. First, an examination of popular women writers in 1920s and 30s New York; second, how the tone and performance of “Smartness” troubled gender roles; and, finally, how the Smart Magazines worry the traditional categories of high-brow and modernism. These battles aren’t mutually exclusive but belong to the ongoing revisionist war of new modernist studies. Keyser’s book joins the ranks of recent studies of the middle-brow that force our attention away from the masculine and restrictive traditions of modernism to the larger unexamined mass of literary production. Continue reading
Tradition and Cynicism in Catherine Keyser’s Playing Smart
The sixth installment of the MagMods book club reading of Catherine Keyser’s Playing Smart comes from Robert Hurd, Associate Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College. He has published on Flaubert and Seinfeld in New Literary History and Joyce and primitivism in The James Joyce Quarterly. His current book project is a study of literary notebooks as a genre, with a special focus on the modernist period.
One of the great strengths of Catherine Keyser’s Playing Smart lies in its delicate balance of close readings of unjustly neglected texts with its working out of a theory of feminist critique from within commodity culture. While taking in Keyser’s careful theoretical development of humor-as-critique in the introduction, I was struck by Keyser’s brief mention of Lauren Berlant who “warns against feminist overreadings that reflect the critic’s desire to find political resistance and then obscure complicity and compromise in middlebrow texts” (9). Berlant’s warning resonated with my own thoughts: who reads humor by women writers in a middlebrow periodical as powerful critique? Is it the 21st century scholar with her or his own transformative political “desire” (or in Keyser’s quote from Michael Warner’s definition of counterpublics as “spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not merely replicative” I would draw attention to the notion of the critic’s hope (italics mine))? Did the actual readers of Vanity Fair or the other “smarts” read it as such a critique and is there evidence that it indeed had a transformative impact on its readership? And does it matter if even the writers themselves saw it this way or not? Continue reading →
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