'Partisan Review' Folds After 68 Years of Publication By JENNIFER K. RUARK
Partisan Review, once the nation's pre-eminent journal of culture and politics, has folded after 68 years of publication. Its most recent issue, released on Monday, will be its last.
The future of the quarterly journal, which is published at Boston University, was up in the air after the death of its cofounder and editor, William Phillips, in September 2002. Its heyday had clearly passed, and some critics described it as moribund.
Since Mr. Phillips's death, Boston University has had the controlling interest in Partisan Review, but it is financed largely by contributions from members of its advisory board.
John Silber, the chancellor of Boston University, said he had hoped to continue publication through this year and then find a "new direction" for the journal. He was surprised earlier this month to receive a letter from Nina J. Koprulu, the chair of the journal's advisory board, informing him simply that the board would no longer publish Partisan Review and that Edith Kurzweil, the current editor and Mr. Phillips's widow, would no longer serve as editor.
Neither Ms. Koprulu nor Ms. Kurzweil, who is traveling in Europe, could be reached for comment.
"I had hoped that Edith Kurzweil would complete the volume and that we would have a few months between the second and third issues to get a group together to think of who would be the new editor and what the journal's new mission would be," said Mr. Silber. Ms. Kurzweil had told him, he says, that she had enough material to publish the remainder of the volume. But after the board's decision, contributors who had had essays accepted were notified and mailed a kill fee.
Mr. Silber had already been surveying people "involved in the realm of ideas," he says, and "the general consensus was that Partisan Review was a reliquary. That was the word more than one person used."
Though the journal's circulation never exceeded 15,000, from the 1930s through the 1960s it served as the leading forum for the nation's leading public intellectuals. Founded by Mr. Phillips and Philip Rahv, the journal was fiercely modern and resolutely anti-Stalinist. Among the now-famous essays it published were Leslie Fiedler's "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," Dwight MacDonald's "Mass Cult and Mid-Cult," and Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp." Other contributors included George Orwell, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe.
"It was a great magazine with a splendid history, and it was magnificent to have a leftist critique of Stalinism when Stalinism was still alive," said Mr. Silber. "Phillips had been able to keep the vitality of the magazine going on long afterwards, but after 1990 and perestroika and Gorbachev, there was a kind of aimlessness, and it no longer had any kind of focus."
The news of the journal's demise came as a surprise to Morris Dickstein, a contributing editor and director of the Institute of Humanities at City University of New York. "It is no longer at the center of American high culture, but neither is any quarterly," said Mr. Dickstein. "The age of the quarterly has passed."
"A lot of what was pioneered by Partisan Review became the stock in trade of The New Republic, The New York Review of Books," and other publications that pay more and provide greater exposure, Mr. Dickstein said. "In part it was killed by its success as the style of the New York intellectuals became more widely dispersed."
"It's still a great name," said Mr. Silber. "I hope we can revive it."
(Selected articles from the last seven volumes of Partisan Review are available online at the journal's Web site.)
<http://www.partisanreview.org/>