American Modernism and Depression Documentary

Jeff Allred

Features 25 poignant, vivid images from the Great Depression
Timely--in light of recent economic troubles, pundits and historians are returning to the topic of Depression-era America to shed light on the current economic climate
Interdisciplinary work of American Studies: draws on photography, history, journalism, and literary studies

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

Jeff Allred

Description

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.

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

Jeff Allred

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Plausible Fictions of the Real
Chapter One: From "Culture" to "Cultural Work": Literature and Labor Between the Wars
Chapter Two: The Road to Somewhere: Locating Knowledge in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
Chapter Three: Moving Violations: Stasis and Mobility in James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
Chapter Four: From Eye to We: Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, Documentary, and Pedagogy
Chapter Five: "We Americans": Henry Luce, Life, and the Mind-Guided Camera
Epilogue: Depression Documentary and the Knot of History
Works Cited
Index

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

Jeff Allred

Author Information

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

American Modernism and Depression Documentary

Jeff Allred

Reviews and Awards

"Allred's work is well supported by detailed analysis of Depression-era photos and text. Recommended." --Choice

"Rather than a critique of a genre, we are presented with a redefinition of form, content, and, most importantly, the daunting import that expressive creativity exercised during a major historical period in the making of America. We are persuaded that what we have critically encoded as 'them' or 'they' turns out to be, definitively, 'we' or 'us.' Old distinctions between the masses and the rest of us are eradicated. Allred's reading of Richard Wright and the 'knot' of race is brilliant." --Houston Baker, Vanderbilt University

"Allred's book offers an impressive new take on the Depression-era documentary that dispenses with the sentimentality and commitment to realism that surrounds much criticism of this genre. More significantly, he offers a way to read documentary not as an interruption of modernist experimentation, but as an integral part of it." -Susan Hegeman, University of Florida

"American Modernism and Depression Documentary is a stirring investigation of the 'aesthetics of interruption' of 1930s-era documentary books. In sparkling, incisive, and lapidary prose, Jeff Allred luminously navigates the fissure between modernism and documentary forms, eloquently accentuating the tension between the photographic image and the surrounding text in the framework of the politics and culture of the Great Depression." --Alan Wald, University of Michigan