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.'

Book News: Environmental writing in the 1930s and 40s

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s

BY MATTHEW M. LAMBERT

UP of Mississippi, 2020

Hardcover : 9781496830401

Paperback : 9781496830418

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Green-Depression

Dust storms. Flooding. The fear of nuclear fallout. While literary critics associate authors of the 1930s and ’40s with leftist political and economic thought, they often ignore concern in the period’s literary and cultural works with major environmental crises. To fill this gap in scholarship, author Matthew M. Lambert argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmentalist thought in a variety of ways. Writers of the time provided a better understanding of the devastating effects that humans can have on the environment. They also depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests. ” Finally, they laid the groundwork for “environmental justice” by focusing on the social effects of environmental exploitation.

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.

To show the reach of environmentalist thought during the period, the first three chapters of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wild, rural, and urban. The fourth and final chapter shifts to debates over the social and environmental effects of technology during the period. In identifying modern environmental ideas and concerns in American literary and cultural works of the 1930s and ’40s, The Green Depression highlights the importance of depression-era literature in understanding the development of environmentalist thought over the twentieth century. This book also builds upon a growing body of scholarship in ecocriticism that describes the unique contributions African American and other nonwhite authors have made to the environmental justice movement and to our understanding of the natural world.

"Many of the important authors considered in this study—Nelson Algren, Tillie Olsen, James T. Farrell, and Richard Wright, to name a few—have received insufficient attention from ecocritics, and yet, as Matthew M. Lambert shows in The Green Depression, their work and other writing during the Depression and the World War II eras is profoundly relevant to the roots of contemporary environmentalism that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. "

- Scott Slovic, coeditor of Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment

Matthew M. Lambert is assistant professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, where he teaches courses in American literature. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Journal of Popular Film and Television.