By Laura Browder
ISBN-10: 1558491252
ISBN-13: 9781558491250
This interdiscplinary examine blends textual research with social heritage to chart the highbrow and inventive ferment of Depression-era the US. It explores the fiction, drama and movie produced in the course of the decade by means of socially unsleeping intellectuals who struggled to create a uniquely American paintings. Challenged by way of a public extra uncovered to comedian strips and tabloids than to critical inventive creativity, those writers and cinematographers used the recommendations of modernism and muckraking to style works that will be experimental with no being insular and may motivate the general public to social activism. Browder first considers authors James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst and John Dos Passos, arguing that their paintings effectively sparked a dialogue approximately what it intended to be American at a time whilst the country's very destiny appeared doubtful. She then examines the residing Newspaper productions of the Federal Theatre venture, which introduced politically and aesthetically provocative drama to twenty-five million americans. In a last bankruptcy, she examines social movies of the interval, concentrating on Paramount's 1939 construction of "One-Third of a Nation".
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Example text
In The Jungle, the main character, Jurgis, has no inner life whatsoever. His only function is to move from one horrifyingly bad job to the next, in order to afford Sinclair ample space to describe, in language that, while evocative, remains perfectly conventional, the stomach-turning conditions under which Jurgis works. The radical literature of the thirties wedded the solid reportage and moral outrage of the muckrakers and the literary experimentation of the modernists. Modernists became wary of literary experimentation for its own sake: Art for art's sake seemed obscene in a time of crisis.
The common school reform movement (185059) resulted in high rates of literacy among American workers. As Michael Denning documents in Mechanic Accents, the dime novel, primarily intended for working-class readers, was born during the period of the Civil War. 6 Moreover, Civil War-era audiences did not observe rigid divisions between "high" and "low" art. As Lawrence Levine has documented in Highbrow/Lowbrow, mid-nineteenth-century audiences were heterogeneous: Workers were likely to line up for performances of Shakespeare or to attend the opera, with no consciousness that they were paying obeisance to timeless art.
Finally, the Living Newspaper staff of the Federal Theatre Project created a form of radical culture that answered all of the objections and preconditions raised by Dos Passos, Farrell, Herbst, and a host of other radical writers. This book focuses on the attempts of these authors to represent American history in the light of Depression politics. The radical writers of the 1930s who did not reject modernism totally attempted to rethink modernist fictional Page 11 techniques in the light of their contemporary political experience.