The New Yorker magazine

This essay reads John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy in the generic context of the bildungsroman. Because the Rabbit series rests on the premise of showing a hero after the conclusion of his formal education, I argue that the four novels can be seen as a post-bildungsroman. This notion reconciles the tetralogy’s three-decade-spanning frame – which invites readings focused on character development (Bildung) – with Updike’s narrative decision to leave out the most formative period in Rabbit’s life: his adolescence. I discuss the large-looming absence of the high school, which Updike introduces as a kind of social laboratory or rehearsal space. This function is traceable in various of Updike’s unpublished juvenilia as well as the mythological high-school novel The Centaur. The second section of this essay discusses the strained relationship between Rabbit and his son Nelson, focusing on the bildungsroman topos of generational fears of epigonism. Finally, I turn to Updike’s often-debated use of an anti-intellectual character, lower than himself in social class and education, as a recording device for the historical era. This direction-based concept of writing ‘down to’ a protagonist is put into dialogue with Rabbit Angstrom’s pervasive ‘down-from’ trajectory, which stands in direct opposition with more conventional American bildungsromane.

[The John Updike Review 8.2 (2021): 49–76]

This dissertation explores The New Yorker magazine's role in shaping the Canadian short story, the contributions of Canadian authors to the magazine, and the aesthetic and ideological implications of transnational literary production. Using archival evidence, it explicates the publication histories of stories by Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro, as well as these authors' relationships with their editors at The New Yorker, in order to demonstrate some of the ways that Canadian literature emerged out of, as well as contributed to, North American transnational contexts. This project uses the work of textual studies scholars, and applies theories of literary collaboration to conceptualize the power dynamic between each author and his or her editors and its relationship to the material history of The New Yorker as a for profit endeavor. In the process, it attempts to negotiate the competing discourses of North American studies and Canadian literary nationalism, positing a correlation between the ways that these authors negotiate their relationships to place and nationalism in their work and the ways in which they react to the idea of giving up authorial control in their dealings with The New Yorker. Despite scholars' recognition that Canadian writing has long been in conversation with the literatures of other nations, until now no studies have attempted to delineate the nature and significance of transnational exchange in the development of the contemporary short story—a form often considered the premier genre of Canadian fiction. The study of these three authors together, each of which represents a discrete moment in the history of The New Yorker, offers a preliminary history of the impact of the intersection of transnationalism and collaboration on the Canadian short story, and the ways that these individual authors' conceptions of place and national identity inflect, or are reflected in, their approaches to collaborative writing practices.

Russian émigré authors created numerous postmodern ways of mediating Russian classics into contemporary fiction. Many scholars discussed Vladimir Nabokov’s role in this phenomenon, while such third wave writers as Andrey Sinyavsky/Abram Terz, Vasiliy Aksenov, Sergei Dovlatov continued and developed this tradition. The paper discusses Dovlatov’s ludic literary references in the original and shows how his three translators, Ann Frydman, Antonina W. Bouis, and Ekaterina Dovlatova, rendered them into English. While Sinyavsky’s books already found direct response in American fiction, resonance to Dovlatov’s stories is likely to occur in Anglophone Russian American literature, thanks to (re)translations and other popularizing projects. Keywords: third wave emigration, Sergei Dovlatov, The New Yorker, Ann Frydman, Antonina W. Bouis, Ekaterina Dovlatova.

Part of a collection of essays on The New Yorker.

I argue that the mid-century critic Dwight Macdonald’s prose emblematizes a mid-century middlebrow literary mode to which I  give the name blustering.  Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self-contradiction.
Furthermore, I argue that blustering might itself be seen as an example of the modernism seemingly conspicuous by its absence from the mid-century New Yorker. I want to claim blustering as a variety of what Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” an example from the expanded repertoire of modernist cultural productions that has been assembled in the new modernist studies over the last fifteen years or so. Hansen suggests that vernacular modernism comprises “cultural practices” outside the traditional modernist canon “that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity.”  Macdonald's blustering in The New Yorker is an exemplary instance of such a practice – a modernist and middlebrow mode mediated by modernism's self-contradictory and competing ideologies that at the same time attempts to articulate those ideologies.

Born to a wealthy, artsy, philanthropic family in Englewood, New Jersey, Lex Kaplen had made a mark at Harvard by founding an undergraduate magazine, which brought him to the notice of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, who hired him. But Lex left his junior editorial job after two years to attend Yale Law School. There he had the idea of starting a new, national "literary" magazine (which is how the New Yorker was classified by an adoring advertising industry), but one less arch, more rooted, written for the young woman who lives in Dubuque, or yearns to. Lex's dream took fire when Si Newhouse, whose Condé Nast acquired the New Yorker in 1985, fired Shawn in 1987. The magazine's editorial staff regarded this as a betrayal, and some who were young and had little to lose joined Lex's project. After a test issue of Wigwag in early 1988, Lex found an investor and hired me as publisher, to start January 1989.

Western journalists (and bloggers) understandably often take deep satisfaction from exposing the corruption, megalomania, and banalities of authoritarian regimes -preferably great powers like China and Russia. But beware of the chupacabras and forgeries. Here are two recent stories that ain't so true:

The Outside Reporter: the New Journalism in Brazil and the production of João Antonio on Realidade magazine, between 1966 and 1968

The New Journalism, style of writing stories with literary techniques created in the United States, found a place in the pages of Revista Realidade, a revolutionary magazine, and Jornal da Tarde, in the late 1960's, in Brazil. This article analyses what were the influences of the style and its most significant journalism writers in the Brazilian scenery.

Personaggi È da questo articolo di Filippo Gentiloni sul «manifesto» del 29 giugno 1982 che ha preso piede la «leggenda metropolitana» che attribuisce a Primo Levi una frase che è invece dello stesso Gentiloni, come è evidente dal testo sottolineato. Anche il «New Yorker» ha avallato il caso. Sempre meglio essere precisi con le parole degli scrittori di David Bidussa S e Calvino ha dato preminenza al rapporto mente/occhio, in Primo Levi è la mano a prevalere. Diversamente: mentre per Calvino è l'atto della visione a tornare frequentemente nella sua traccia narrativa (così in Palomar, ma anche il capitolo «Visibilità» delle sue Lezioni americane, il testo che in in qualche modo siamo indotti a leggere come suo testamento), in Primo Levi è il gusto del manufatto, di ciò che la mano può fare -e soprattutto "creare" -ad attrarlo e a costituire una costante nella sua riflessione. Le mani esprimono una carica di violenza che Primo Levi non ignora. Tut-© RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA L'insidioso sillogismo sull'essere «ebrei di qualcun altro» che gli viene attribuito in rete è un falso. Ecco come è accaduto Nel 1982 «il Manifesto» pubblica una recensione che viene citata sul «New Yorker» in un saggio di Joan Acocella che dimentica, però, due virgolette importanti Gusto del manufatto, capacità di creare, di saper fare sono una costante della riflessione di Levi. Così come la manualità violenta dei Lager, tra carnefici e schiavi La Bibbia e Dante, ma anche Rabelais, Baudelaire, Manzoni: Alberto Cavaglion ha scovato alcuni riferimenti imprevisti in «Se questo è un uomo»

Em redações e universidades brasileiras o incentivo à produção do perfil jornalístico aumentou depois de mais de duas décadas sem uma publicação reconhecida pelo desenvolvimento do gênero. Nos anos 2000, o perfil voltou ao cenário do país por meio de jornais-laboratórios e imprensa especializada, na tentativa de resgatar a tradição da revista Realidade. Centrado num protagonista, cuja história é desenvolvida fora dos cânones da biografia e da reportagem, o perfil é uma narrativa que almeja o registro do instante do personagem. Por muito tempo, essa prática esteve ligada às histórias de vida, ao focar apenas seres humanos. O uso de técnicas de jornalismo literário, disseminadas principalmente pelo novo jornalismo norte-americano, em revistas como The New Yorker, trouxe, porém, experimentações que questionam a necessidade de se fazer perfis apenas sobre pessoas. Ao analisar três relatos centralizados em figuras não humanas, esta pesquisa pretende expandir as possibilidades de se escrever um perfil, independentemente do personagem escolhido.

This paper discusses 'Street Life', 'Days in the Branch' and 'A Place of Pasts', excerpts fragments from The New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell' s unfinished memoir book he started writing during his famous period of silence from 1964 to 1994. Within the scope of Mitchell' s writings, this group of texts may be considered as part of his fourth period of writing, one that was gradually established between the mid-1940s and early 1960s. They also constitute a unique genre of journalism which is referred to here as his memorial essay.

Keywords: Literary Journalism. Essay. Memoir writing. Joseph Mitchell. The New Yorker.

The arrival of printing in South Africa occasioned a great many social changes: it facilitated governance, participated in the production and propagation of anthropological and scientific ‘knowledge’ about the place and its peoples, required the development of orthographies for African languages, and served the spread of western education and of Christianity—with all of its attendant complex and ambiguous consequences. Print, Text & Book Cultures in South Africa explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives—historical, bibliographic, literary critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book-collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of ‘book history’ for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.

This volume is the most comprehensive and representative introduction to the study of print and of the book in South Africa, showcasing the best of current research (while problematising the nature of ‘the book’, and exploring the difficult conditions for print in the country). It takes the measure of the impact of book-historical and related fields of study on South African scholarship, while pointing the way towards avenues for future research.

Authors (in order of appearance): Leon de Kock, Isabel Hofmeyr, Meg Samuelson, John Gouws, Lucy Graham, Rita Barnard, Andrew van der Vlies, Jarad Zimbler, Patrick Flanery, Lize Kriel, Archie Dick, Hedley Twidle, Jeff Opland, Deborah Seddon, Lily Saint, Peter McDonald, Margriet van der Waal, Natasha Distiller, Sarah Nuttall, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Beth Le Roux.

*

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa is a field-defining contribution to the country’s literary scholarship. Andrew van der Vlies’s introductory essay maps the conceptual terrain in a systematic and engaging way, illustrating its relevance to South Africa’s literary and cultural history. The essays that follow demonstrate the archival richness and liveliness of the field, while opening doors to future research. Beyond South Africa, the book will be exemplary in showing how book histories develop under postcolonial conditions.
-- David Attwell, author of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005), and co-editor of The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012)

South African literary criticism has been rejuvenated by an emphasis on the materiality of book production and circulation, and the historical embedding of those institutions and practices that turned texts into ‘works’ considered worthy of our attention. This elegantly framed collection of readable, provocative essays examines the relations between the production and consumption of books to present a rich social history of South African print cultures. It is indispensible reading for anyone seeking to come to terms with the processes and practices, both national and transnational, that have fashioned this country’s literature and the ways in which it is read and understood.
-- Michael Titlestad, University of the Witwatersrand

This is an extraordinarily rewarding book. Its essays by key scholars and book-trade practitioners attend to the rich complexity of the varied trajectories and meanings of South African print culture. The introduction by Andrew van der Vlies offers a tour de force statement of the complex interplay between South African social, political, and economic realities and book history methodologies; each piece that follows charts a compelling course through the shifting contexts for South African print, whether to bring those contexts to bear on literary interpretation, or to highlight the interdependence of print and history.
-- Sarah Brouillette, author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007)

Wide-ranging and sophisticated, this collection of essays does not simply add more case studies to the book-historical canon but contributes new models to the debate.
-- Leah Price, Harvard University

Thought provoking, wide ranging in its subject material, and dynamically edited, this collection marks a turning point in the study of book cultures in South Africa. These essays, exemplars of recently published work in the field, draw attention to the rich, interdisciplinary seams of material uncovered by key exponents of South African print culture history. The work as a whole demonstrates how one can engage with the confluence of text, people, history, culture, and print technology in South African contexts. It will prove one of the first ports of call for anyone wishing to undertake further journeys in this subject area in the future.
-- David Finkelstein, co-editor of The Book History Reader (2001) and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland (vol. 4, 2007), and co-author of An Introduction to Book History (2005)

Janet Flanner’s early “Paris Letters” invite her New Yorker audience to view Paris with condescension. The content and rhetoric of these pieces reverse the traditional hierarchy between French and American cultures, showing her readers that superiority means seeing as the master subject—a seductive perspective for an economically emergent readership.

Starting from 1934, the covers of The New Yorker began to portray images of melancholy animals looking at the changes occurring in the American landscape at the time, endangering their presence in the modern way of living. The essay chronicles the story of the vanishing animal, a recurring theme of the magazine’s covers from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties, as a visual counterpart to the advancement of progress and the effects it had on the landscape, as well as on the utopian pastoral ideal that it purported to democratize among the middle class. The thread linking these New Yorker covers therefore offers a modern rendition of an American Paradise Lost, and the artists’ illustrations become what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls ‘virtual shelters for displaced animals.’ Among several popular magazines, The New Yorker was by far the greatest chronicler of this loss, despite its urban focus, or perhaps thanks to it, as it allowed a sense of unbiased detachment and urbane condescendence towards the suburbs and the country.

Nabokov's relationship with The New Yorker magazine was long and complicated. In addition to championing Nabokov's interests and promoting his work to American readers, Katherine White took on the responsibility of correcting the Russian writer's not-always-impeccable English. This essay documents their relationship and offers a first-time publication of excerpts from their correspondence.

Russian émigré authors created numerous postmodern ways of mediating Russian classics into contemporary fiction. Many scholars discussed Vladimir Nabokov's role in this phenomenon, while such third wave writers as Andrey Sinyavsky/Abram Terz, Vasiliy Aksenov, Sergei Dovlatov continued and developed this tradition. The paper discusses Dovlatov's ludic literary references in the original and shows how his three translators, Ann Frydman, Antonina W. Bouis, and Ekaterina Dovlatova, rendered them into English. While Sinyavsky's books already found direct response in American fiction, resonance to Dovlatov's stories is likely to occur in Anglophone Russian American literature, thanks to (re)translations and other popularizing projects.

With Hobbes’ political iconography in the background, Kadir Nelson’s recent cover for The New Yorker evokes what Charles Mills calls “the racial contract.” Nelson’s George Floyd rises out of the landscape of Black history much like Hobbes’ sovereign, but Floyd — in stark contrast to Hobbes’ sword-bearing “person of the State” — is, quite literally, an unarmed man.

Placed between Literature and Journalism by amalgamating fact checking to the narrative aesthetics of fiction, Literary Journalism faces the challenge of producing works of ambiguous character. One of the factors in this dispute is the use of composite characters, created by combining biographic features of a number of sources in a single person. In this chapter we will discuss the borders between fact and fiction in this kind of narrative, with an emphasis on the separation between real and fake characters,, treated as fraud in the press from the 1980s due to cases such as those of The Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke and The New York Times reporter Jason Blair, in 2003, as well as the leading rapist fabricated by Sabrina Rubin Elderly's main source for her Rolling Stone November 2014 cover story "A Rape on Campus". Such examples are contrasted with that of composite characters, which play a very different role and, albeit now treated as fiction, are not perceived by us as deceptive and nonethical -- the example discussed here is the cycle of profiles featuring Hugh Griffin Flood by the American reporter Joseph Mitchell(1908-1996), which where published in The New Yorker magazine in the 1940s.

Resumo: Neste trabalho, procuramos identificar os esforços de Joseph Mitchell para apresentar, em seus perfis e reportagens produzidos para a revista The New Yorker, aquilo que Michel Maffesoli denomina "conhecimento comum", aqui colocado em diálogo ao conceito de "ideologia do cotidiano" proposto por Mikhail Bakhtin/Valentin Volóchinov. Desse modo, percebemos uma estratégia de reportagem bastante polifônica em seu conjunto, em contraponto à reprodução de ideologias hegemônicas – particularmente no gesto do repórter de trabalhar com "pequenos temas", com "fatias de vida", em vez de se debruçar sobre os grandes tópicos que estavam na agenda de discussão da sociedade americana no período que compreende as décadas de 1930 até 1960. Abstract: In this paper we aim to identify reporter Joseph Mitchell's efforts, in his profiles and reportages written for The New Yorker magazine, towards featuring what Michel Maffesoli calls the " common knowledge" , here associated to the notion of " everyday ideology" proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin/Valentin Volóchinov. Thus, we notice a body of reportage strategy which is strongly polyphonic, instead of reproducing hegemonic ideologies – in particular in the reporter's preference for writing about " small subjects" , " slices of life" , instead of focusing on the big topics which were in the American society's agenda during the 1930s-1960s period.

This article considers the publication of two excerpts from J.M. Coetzee's 2005 novel, Slow man. The first, appearing as “The blow” in The New Yorker magazine, is a silently edited version of the first fourteen chapters of the novel, which makes considerable stylistic changes, as well as transforming the text to perform as an autonomous piece of short fiction. The article considers both the context of its publication — Coetzee's first appearance in the magazine — as well as the symbolic and suggestive absences left by the magazine's editorial interventions. The second excerpt, in Bloomsbury's New beginnings charitable anthology (benefiting the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake Charities), suggests the continued workings of Coetzee's acute awareness of the importance of place, as well as his investment in Australia (his home since 2002) and the larger Australasian region. Both cases offer suggestive instances of the placement of Coetzee's work as (arguably no-longer) “South African” cultural texts, at large in, and subject to the demands of, constructions of high art in global mediascapes.

This paper examines the composition and editing of John Cheever’s 1956 short story ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ by the author and his editors at The New Yorker, a popular general interest magazine, in early 1955. It argues that, in the case of ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’, Cheever and his editors, Gustave Lobrano and William Maxwell, worked in tandem with each other, despite their different objectives and motivations, in order to transform a submission deemed unsuitable for the magazine into an archetypal suburban “New Yorker story” about Johnny Hake, an upper-middle-class suburbanite who steals money from his neighbours in a series of burglaries to avoid foreclosure after losing his job.

This article considers the publication of two excerpts from J.M. Coetzee's 2005 novel, Slow man. The first, appearing as “The blow” in The New Yorker magazine, is a silently edited version of the first fourteen chapters of the novel, which makes considerable stylistic changes, as well as transforming the text to perform as an autonomous piece of short fiction. The article considers both the context of its publication — Coetzee's first appearance in the magazine — as well as the symbolic and suggestive absences left by the magazine's editorial interventions. The second excerpt, in Bloomsbury's New beginnings charitable anthology (benefiting the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake Charities), suggests the continued workings of Coetzee's acute awareness of the importance of place, as well as his investment in Australia (his home since 2002) and the larger Australasian region. Both cases offer suggestive instances of the placement of Coetzee's work as (arguably no-longer) “South African” cultural texts, at large in, and subject to the demands of, constructions of high art in global mediascapes.

Around the time I was starting this text I saw, by chance, the fllm Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was on Portuguese television for the 100 th time, and even though I have no TV set anymore, this was a Sunday afternoon and I went to one of these websites were one can watch live television. I was doing a kind of time travel, remembering when I was younger, on lazy winter weekends. So the movie was on and I laid down in the couch and watched it. I must say I didn't watch until the end, as my son woke up from his afternoon nap.