journals

Library event: Que vlo-ve? and Le Mot

Posted on January 21, 2025January 22, 2025 by Claude Potts

In these austere times where both financial resources and shelving space are limited, it has become a rare occasion when we are able to pursue full-runs of older periodicals. However, the recent acquisition of these two—one from France and the other from Belgium—in more or less the same time period has sparked the idea of hosting a hands-on journal presentation for those interested in interacting with the journals before the issues are processed, cataloged, bound, and stored in their distinct library locations.

Que vlo-ve?: bulletin de l’Association internationale des amis de Guillaume Apollinaire was published from January 1973 to 2004. Centered on the work of the celebrated 20th century French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist and art critic of Polish descent, its intention was not to duplicate articles published in the annual Guillaume Apollinaire series by Lettres Modernes. Instead, it was meant to welcome articles that could not easily find a place, news of the association and of the museum as well as news that members of the scholarly society wished to disseminate internationally.

Le Mot (1914-1915)

Sardonic and visually rich, this wartime French literary and artistic journal published by Jean Cocteau and Paul Iribe, was characterized by a restrained modernism and a fiercely nationalistic, anti-German perspective. Le Mot (The Word) was a wartime sequel to François Bernouard’s Schéhérazade: Album Mensuel d’Oeuvres Inédites d’Art et de Littérature (1909-11). Its primary purpose was to establish an entirely French artistic style and taste—anti-bourgeois and uninfluenced by German modernism.

Reports of the brutal treatment of noncombatants (such as mass executions that included women, small children, and the elderly) and damage to towns and cultural centers shocked the public, leading to a characterization, particularly within France, of the German soldiers as destructive and uncivilized “huns” particularly within wartime propaganda. The bi-monthly periodical included cover designs by not only Iribe and Cocteau but also Sem, Raoul Dufy, Léon Bakst, André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Pierre-Emile Legrain. Cocteau signed his drawings as Jim, the name of his dog. In August 1914, when war was declared with Germany, he was twenty-five years old. Like many patriotic young Frenchmen, Cocteau tried to enlist but was turned down because of his health. Looking for other ways to serve his country and the war effort, he collaborated with Iribe to launch Le Mot. As a teenager, Iribe drew illustrations for the popular caricature journal L’Assiette au Beurre (The Butter Plate), which ran from 1902 to 1912. He also freelanced for Le Témoin, Rire, Sourire and other periodicals and was enthusiastic about starting a satirical journal of his own.

Please join us for an interactive show and tell with special guest Willard Bohn, alumnus of the Department of French and Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University.

Thursday, February 6
4-5:30 pm
223 Doe Library (accessible through south end of the Heyns Reading Room)

No rsvp required.

—-
Claude H. Potts (he/him)
Librarian for Romance Language Collections

Serials reductions as part of the life cycle

Posted on April 5, 2023April 5, 2023 by Claude Potts

photo: stack of journals — *Journals in the Romance languages in Doe Library’s Heyns Reading Room.*

You need not fret about L’Infiniti, Écrits de Paris, Revue des deux mondes, Revue des études Italiennes, Revista de occidente, Claves de razón práctica, El Mediterráneo, Atena, MicroMega, Humanitas, Europe, Misure critiche, Commentaire, Nuova antologia, Il Mulino, and many more journals in the Southern European collection. These have evaded cancellation for now in the second year of a two-year planned reduction of UC Berkeley Library’s acquisitions and licensing budget.

This week, the Library has shared with the campus via CALmessages a complete list of proposed serials cancellations for public comment until May 12. For 2023/24, the budget for recurring annual costs such as subscription databases, journal subscriptions, ebook and journal packages will be reduced by $850K. The Arts and Humanities portion of the serials reduction came to about $165,000. Much of this was met through a renegotiation of the price share for a statewide Taylor & Francis journal package that met about $65,000 of our target. The remaining $100,000 came from the subject funds. (For Latin American and Caribbean Studies, please scroll down to the Social Sciences grouping.)

The proposed list of cancellations was developed to minimize the impact on the community by focusing on duplicative subscriptions; journals and databases that are available open access or in other ways; and the most seldomly accessed journals and databases. Together, subject librarians have reviewed all subscriptions and prioritized retaining titles based on strength of need and available alternatives for access. Across disciplines, the total number of titles came to 1,204 which includes large packages. These ranged from very cheap (Annali di statistica @ $9.67/year) to exorbitant (Greenwire for $17,544/year).

These exercises are never easy but have become a regular part of the scholarly resources life cycle as academic libraries continue to endure rapidly declining budgets for an expanding terrain of expensive intellectual materials in both print and digital formats. The last serials reduction was in 2018 in the amount of $1.5M. At the beginning of this year, the Library reduced its discretionary budget (mostly for books) by $850K and two years earlier by $1M.

Including our recent reductions in 2018 and 2020, this year’s serials reduction will bring the total annual reduction in acquisitions and licensing to $4.425 million – an approximately 35% reduction of campus, state, and unrestricted funding for collections since 2016. Without an influx of funding from the campus and the state, the UC Berkeley Library can expect to see another round of budget cuts in the near future.

For the month of April, I will be posting on Instagram nearly every day the cover of a different journal in the Romance languages that we are retaining access to for now in either print or digital form.

Journal Portal for Scholars of Decolonial and Diaspora Studies

Posted on February 17, 2022February 17, 2022 by Claude Potts

The Portail Mondial des Revues/Global Journals Portal of the French Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) comprises a collection of over one thousand decolonial and diasporic periodicals spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often ephemeral and with brief publication histories, these journals offer glimpses into the literary critical and social critical practices of their times.

Publications in the database can be filtered by geographical area, language, and topic (literature, gender studies, diaspora, etc.). For those that are open access, links are provided directly inside the database. Each entry contains a list of articles and books that have recently cited the journal, allowing scholars easy access to critical work surrounding each publication.

At the core of the collection are works published in Paris, particularly during the entre-guerres period, that convey the voices of migrant and diasporic communities. Among these are journals such as the anti-imperialist Phản-Đế (1934), published by the Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale, and Césaire and Senghor’s L’Étudiant noir (1935). Many publications such as L’Arche (1944-1948), with joint editions from both Paris and Algiers, publish literary texts from around the world, placing them alongside reflections on contemporaneous philosophical and political debates.

Works span across several dozen languages and every continent of the globe. Publications such as the Catalan El Cami and the Haitian Bon Nouvèl account for just two of many periodicals published in minority languages and creoles. Other publications offer transnational and multilingual perspectives such as the Franco-uruguayan Entregas de la Licorne and Tricontinental, a social critical periodical published through the Organization for Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Cameron Flynn