THE CULTURE AND COMMERCE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY :: essays papers

THE CULTURE AND COMMERCE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY The source is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age.Boris Pasternak No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.Samuel Johnson Andrew bills check is an immensely enjoyable read, one which presents the reader with an exhaustive historical treatment of that particularly American literary invention, the mass-marketed short story magazine.However, your final reaction to this appropriate is likely to depend on who you agree with, Pasternak or Johnson, and thus whether you see writers as alienated individualists or clubby entrepreneurs. Levy begins at the same get into everything about the American short story begins, with Edgar Allan Poe.While it is generally accepted that Poes review of Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales (1842) established twain a definition of and an attitude toward the American short story, Levy believes that Poe might better be considered the inventor of the American shor t story magazine.Levy quotes Poes letters and journals at length, demonstrating that Poes ultimate aim was to found a magazine of my own.Poe dream of creating a magazine which would offer high culture to an expanding middle class, a population drawn to the magazine precisely because it represented their affable aspirations rather than their social realities.Levy points out that the truly lasting American magazines have in fact followed Poes plan, The New Yorker being perhaps the most obvious example. Levy describes his book as primarily a study of the commerce of the short story, of ...what Poe thought about his checkbook, and how his checkbook became the short story.Yet his most interesting assertion has less to do with sales than national character.He argues (in The Land of Definition) that the American magazine stands in a metonymic relationship to the American story, in that the paradoxical assertion to both disposability and lasting value of the magazine represents perfectly t he most persistent criticism and praise made of the short story.One would like to see an entire book abandoned to a study of this relationship. Furthermore, if the economic foundations for the short storys development is the heart of his book, then we cannot dismiss what Levy thinks of the modern writing workshop, which has in effect created todays Writing constancy The most striking aspect of the modern workshop system, for instance, is the extent to which its ensures the continued health of the short story ... The workshop system .