Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America

This book gives readers a fresh take on Depression-era poetry in relation to the idea of modernity experienced as crisis.

Justin Parks (Author)

9781009347839, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 October 2023

238 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.51 kg

'The highly detailed and illuminating close readings represent one of the book's many strengths: to reconceive the role of close reading as a crucial component of holistic, interdisciplinary claims.' Ruth Jennison, American Literary History

Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society. Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America pursues this guiding premise through six chapters, each framing the problem of the ongoing vitality of language as a social medium with respect to a particular poet: Louis Zukofsky and the commodification of language; Muriel Rukeyser and documentary photography; Charles Reznikoff and Depression-era historiography; Sterling A. Brown and the blues as both an ethnographic phenomenon and a marketable cultural product; Norman Macleod and Southwest regionalism; and Lorine Niedecker and ethnographic surrealism. The book closes by examining the shifting status of the poet as society transitioned from a focus on production to an emphasis on consumption in the Post-war period.

Introduction: Poetry, Modernity, Crisis
Part I. Historical Materialism and the Materials of History: 1. Thinking with Things: Language, Commodities, and the Social Ontologies of Objects in Louis Zukofsky's 'A'-8 and 9
2. New Ways of Seeing: Muriel Rukeyser's 'Book of the Dead' and the Politics of Documentary Photography
3. Pieces of the Body Torn out by the Roots: Charles Reznikoff's 1934 Testimony and the Idiom of American Violence
Part II. Ethnographic Modernity and Its Discontents: 4. Vernacular Technologies: The Folksong Collector, the Phonograph, and Blues Authenticity in Sterling A. Brown's Southern Road
5. Interlopers out of a Pale Land: Norman Macleod's Ethnographic Regionalism and Antimodernism in New Mexico
6. Object Lessons: Ethnographic Surrealism and the Poetics of Detachment in Lorine Niedecker's New Goose
Coda: The Poet as Consumer.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]