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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Friday, April 26, 2024

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the epistemological crisis within 1930s American poetry

Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America 

BY JUSTIN PARKS

 


Cambridge UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781009347839

https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/literature/american-literature/poetry-and-limits-modernity-depression-america?format=HB


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.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

  • Provides a revised understanding of the cultural history of the Great Depression
  • Furnishes updated interpretations of important poetic texts
  • Provides an account of the relationship between poetry and crisis, which readers can apply to texts beyond the ones covered in this study


Justin Parks is associate professor at the Institute for Language and Culture at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. His work is rooted in modern and contemporary poetry and American studies, with particular interest in Depression-era culture. His recent work engages with energy humanities: he has edited a special of Textual Practice on 'writing extractivism.'

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