Introducing magazines and/as media: the aesthetics and politics of serial form

In her recent book on the ongoing relationship between modernism and media, Jessica Pressman makes the convincing claim that modernism—as a "strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices in ways that produce new art—is "centrally about media" (3–4 emphasis added). Pressman is not the first to link modernist aesthetic innovation to the rapid transformation of media technologies at the turn of the twentieth century; she identifies her indebt - edness to media scholars including Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, and Marshall McLuhan, all of whom engage with the new discourse networks afforded by the rise of phonographs, radio, and cinema.