Voices of Persuasion

Staub recasts 1930s cultural history, demonstrating the seldom-discussed multicultural diversity of those genres so characteristic of the period: ethnography, documentary, journalism and polemical fiction.

Michael E. Staub (Author)

9780521453905, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 May 1994

192 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.402 kg

'A fresh, eloquent, and stimulating argument that with great originality joins Native American and African-American writing with the 'class' context of thirties documentary. What is original in a still more significant sense, however, is the book's underlying polemic: that recent postmodern challenges to the practice of ethnographic representation - which have become a sort of skeptical, indeed, oversensitive common sense - have caused us to neglect both the political power and the surprising self-consciousness of much early, politically rather than professionally motivated writing about 'disinherited people'. An extremely important argument, and one that helps redeem the efforts of anthropology's pre-professional ancestors from the postmodern critique. It should be an inspiration to reflexive ethnographers.' Bruce Robbins, Rutgers University

In this innovative study, Michael Staub recasts 1930s cultural history by analysing those genres so characteristic of the Depression era: Staub argues that several thirties writers - precisely because of their encounters with disinherited peoples - anticipated the dilemmas poststructuralist theory would identify; an awareness of the ambiguousness of historical truth, and the impossibility of representing reality without being complicit in its distortion. New interpretations of such canonised authors as James Agee, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, John G. Neihardt and Tille Olsen are coupled with critical discussions of previously little-known works of ethnography, journalism, oral history and polemical fiction. This book will interest all who are concerned with the problematic relationship between representation and social reality and their mutual inextricability.

Preface
1. Spoken testimony, Unwritten History
2. You won't hear it nicely John Dos Passos and James Agee
3. Telling native American history John Neihardt, William Benson and Ruth Underhill
4. Talking black, talking back Zora Neale Hurston
5. Giving the people voice Tillie Olsen and the Communist Press
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]