After registration, BAAS attendees set off from Hunter Halls to this morning’s various panels: Counterinsurgency and US Empire; Biography, Memory, and the Cold War Transatlantic Relationship; Intersections of Care, Justice, and Sexuality; Urban Histories and Environments; Race, Violence, and Mourning in US-Scottish Relations; Federal Funding for 20th Century American Literature; The American Cultural Imagination; and Regional and National Mythmaking.
From these diverse panels, we then convened in the Boyd Orr to listen to Professor Sinéad Moynihan’s fascinating Eccles Centre Keynote Lecture: ‘Author, Editor, Agent: The “Institutional Turn” and Mid-Century Magazines.’
As the title suggests, Moynihan presented research on the “Institutional Turn” in mid-century magazines, exploring the roles of the author, the editor, and the agent respectively. Moynihan introduced the concept of ‘speculative editing,’ a practice in which an individual editor makes substantial revisions to an author’s work before showing it to colleagues in order to give the work a better chance of appeasing in-house colleagues and therefore increasing the chances of acceptance. Editors like Rachel MacKenzie (fiction editor of The New Yorker between 1956–79) engaged in this type of preliminary editing, a ‘good faith’ practice which has the potential to position the author at a disadvantage, particularly in cases where payment would depend on the approval of such revisions.
As an example of this editorial practice, Moynihan showed MacKenzie’s suggested revisions of Benedict Kiely’s “The Wild Boy”, which included an extensive array of deletions and structural edits. Most of the edits were retained, suggesting that Kiely was at least somewhat satisfied, yet some of the cuts, such as a long-winded introductory paragraph, were restored in later publications. For some authors like Ann Petry, whose story was not accepted for publication at the time, the fact that both agent and editor liked and were supportive of the story meant more than its acceptance and publication.
Moving on from discussion of the editor to that of the agent, Moynihan reflected on mid-century dismissive attitudes towards the agent role, occupied mainly by white women, as ‘administrivia’. These and other attitudes were reflected variously in metaphors at the time, some of which persisted, whether through gendered metaphors like ‘middlemen’ or the agent as ‘maternal’; the ‘romance/matchmaking’ metaphor; or through more overt derogatory metaphors like ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘parasites’, and even ‘corrupters of innocents’.
To present a simplified version of Moynihan’s concluding remarks, the often hidden labour of the editor/agent was reflected upon, as well as the role of the author in the publication of their work as one which is not isolated, but complex and collaborative.
Thank you to Professor Moynihan and to all other speakers today so far. Coach transport will leave for Reception at 17:30 from campus, and a group will be walking if you would like to join them.
American Studies at Glasgow 