Computer Science for (Live) Modernism(s)?

This chapter frames little magazines and periodicals as modernist objects which are often preoccupied with their own materiality in a distinct and unprecedented manner. To illustrate this principle, I argue that the little magazine represents the textual equivalent of what is known in the field of Computer Science as a metaobject, a part of a computer system that has the power to modify and update itself via a process known as reflection. While the production of a book—the typesetting, printing, and assemblage or ‘gathering’ of pages tended to take place out of the sight of their writers, the limited economic funds of a little magazine meant that their editors had a direct role in the print process. Drawing on examples from global periodicals including the British Rhythm, the Japanese periodical Shirakaba, the American Crisis and Little Review, I argue that it is periodicals’ status as metaobjects that makes them modernist. Their editors’ material choices and continued self-conscious references to the magazine as object (often with a set object) produce uniquely subjective, live reading experiences which characterize magazines as indelibly modern. Their modernisms—able to be experienced just through reading the magazine – are therefore timeless and can be replayed again and again.