Informed by modernist high seriousness in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the young MR fused cutting-edge art and Beat rebellion with New England Transcendentalism and European, Black, and Jewish radicalism. Robert Frost, who appears on the cover of the first issue, wrote a poem for the occasion. Cut to Summer 1998. A 1986 photograph of Allen Ginsburg and James Baldwin, taken at the Albion Bookshop in Amherst, appears on the cover. Within, we find more Ginsburg and Baldwin, as well as an article on Frost.

Though some commitments are forever, the MR has ranged far from its base in North American and European, especially German, art and ideas. It welcomed multiculturalism when the word was new, and from the start devoted issues to race, gender, and ethnicity. “The Review is more issue-oriented than most U.S. literary magazines,” observes coeditor Mel Heath. “It has art sections, no book reviews, and it has always attracted many overseas subscribers.”

As it begins its fortieth year, founding editor Jules Chametzky is still on the job, as are longtime co-editors Mel Heath and Paul Jenkins. Secretary Carol Fetler has been with the journal in several capacities since 1972. The editorial board has changed as little as mortality allows. The downside of such “tremendous and rare editorial continuity,” Heath acknowledges, may be a “certain predictability” in the choices the staff make among the hundreds of unsolicited contributions that the MR receives. Yet, had the MR not evolved, and done so boldly, it would surely long since have perished.

What journal would want to follow on the heels of so enduring a representative of noble human aspirations? How about a playful, self-consciously literary five-year-old internationalist management journal whose heady mandate calls for breaking boundaries and (re)building bridges among disciplines?

Organization: the interdisciplinary journal of organization, theory and society, is edited in Amherst by Linda Smircich and Marta Calás of the School of Management, along with their co-editors at the universities of Warwick and Lancaster. The name – in bold black type against a glossy white ground – deconstructs before your eyes, along with, by implication, the bloated abstraction that might once have worn a capital O. Thus does the cover visually signal “Pass At Your Own Risk” to the browser who may have missed a few decades of Foucauld-ian or Lyotardian developments in what business schools used to call “organizational studies” or – in the Really Dark Ages – “business administration.”

The 1994 mission statement that launched this innovative journal prepares the reader for what she will encounter: “Beyond the more traditional relations between organization studies, sociology, and psychology . . .[becoming neo-disciplinary] means input from the fields of cultural studies, the analysis of consumption, architecture, philosophy, accounting, literary theory, the study of temporality, technology, anarchism, and so on”. Of course.

Welcome to postmodern organizational theory, a theoretical space where literary deconstruction, anthropological theory, and the sociology of organizations will be more useful to you than ancient ritual knowledge of micro and macro, the workings of the IMF, Federal Reserve Bank, or the NYSE – all of which may be perceived as close kin to the canon in the humanities and normal science in Kuhn’s 1963 model.

Decades beyond the business (as usual) journal that “spoke to the technical and political needs of ‘dominant coalitions’ in business, government and the professions,” organization participates actively in the creation of the neo-discipline it envisions. Its mission is to explore “uncharted territory . . . to gain space for theorizing about interesting organization phenomena and the need to pursue these wherever such a pursuit may lead.” Do those words have a familiar ring?

Hungry? Consider a consultation with Pris-cilla Clarkson of the Department of Exercise Science. In addition to serving as Associate Dean of the College of Public Health and Health Sciences, which has a new center for nutrition in sport and human performance, Clarkson edits the International Journal of Sport Nutrition.

Read “primarily by exercise scientists and nutritionists who do research in sport nutrition,” the journal publishes studies with titles like “Nutrient Intake of Elite Sailors During a Solitary Long-Distance Offshore Race” and “Energy and Nutrient Intakes of the United States National Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Team” (Vol. 8, no. 4). Now and again, it even addresses the needs of more ordinary star athletes – e.g., “Effective Nutrition Support Programs for College Athletes” (Vol. 8, no. 3). This is a journal that provides technical answers to questions many of us would never think of asking.

From his office on the second floor of Bartlett Hall, English professor David Paroissien has edited the Dickens Quarterly since 1983 when, largely because of his persistence, it replaced the Dickens Studies Newsletter. A publication of the Dickens Society of America, the Quarterly is a small-format journal of 60-80 pages. It has the same delightful Cruikshank drawing on every cover, and charming period illustrations within. In addition to three or four articles, each issue features book reviews, titles of dissertations, notes on contributors, Dickens Society business reports, and the quarterly Dickens Checklist, “an open bibliography that provides the most exhaustive list available of materials treating Dickens.”

About half of the Dickens Society’s approximately 600 member-subscribers are libraries. Under Paroissien’s editorship, the slender Quarterly has more than satisfied its mandate “to keep readers informed about current research and developments in Dickens scholarship.”

What are those developments? “Younger scholars,” Paroissien reports, “who have spent more time with theory and less with fiction, have found Dickens amenable to almost any theory . . . [including] Foucault-inspired French cultural readings and fruitful feminist readings.” But historical scholarship is not in retreat: “Important groups of scholars are still working on fundamental documents, trying to provide as accurate a text as they can. . . . As Dickens’s works recede into the past, many of us realize that it is essential to see them in historical context.”