American modernism and Depression documentary

In his critical survey of American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), Alfred Kazin writes that the documentary writing of the 1930s amounted to a “vast granary of facts,” a “sub-literature” that lacks the formal sophistication a vigorously modern art requires. Kazin\u27s early verdict has been upheld by many subsequent judgments: critics still largely think of the documentary mode as a residue of the realism that modernism supersedes. My argument views American modernism through the lens of the 1930s documentary book, countering this critical line with the argument that “documentary” and “modernism” converge in these texts. One can read this convergence, for example, in the way these texts play games with the relative locations of readers and subjects, or in their emphasis on the problematic status of “authenticity” in representing voices, bodies, and objects. My project does not so much aim to add yet another neglected set of texts to an expanded canon as to provide a new vision of inter-war American culture as a body of work that reflects and responds to parallel emergences in American society: new desires bound up in the migration of groups from rural to urban areas, new media dominated by the photographic image, and new locations and functions for intellectual work. I frame my examination of the documentary books that make up the core of this project within the larger context of changes in the production and consumption of culture in the inter-war United States. In the introduction, I emphasize utopian stirrings among Depression-era intellectuals bent on remaking American culture as something laborist and democratic, as seen in new theories of the role of the intellectual in society by writers like John Dos Passos and Kenneth Burke. In the conclusion, I temper this emphasis on intellectuals\u27 agency by looking at the decisive shift in the period, best seen in the rise of Henry Luce\u27s Time, Inc., towards an increasingly consolidated culture industry