American Modernism and Depression Documentary

American Modernism and Depression Documentary surveys the uneven terrain of American modernity through the lens of the documentary book. Jeff Allred argues that photo-texts of the 1930s stage a set of mediations between rural hinterlands and metropolitan areas, between elite producers of
culture and the forgotten man of Depression-era culture, between a myth of consensual national unity and various competing ethnic and regional collectivities. In light of the complexity this entails, this study takes issue with a critical tradition that has painted the documentary expression of
the 1930s as a simplistic and propagandistic divergence from literary modernism. Allred situates these texts, and the documentary modernism they represent, as a central part of American modernism and response to American modernity, as he looks at the impoverished sharecroppers depcited in the
groundbreaking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the disenfranchised African Americans in Richard Wright's polemical 12 Million Black Voices, and the experiments in Depression-era photography found in Life magazine.


Author: Jeff Allred
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/01/2012
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780199938544

About the Author

Jeff Allred is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College at the City University of New York.

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