Research Catalog

Sensational modernism : experimental fiction and photography in thirties America

Title: Sensational modernism : experimental fiction and photography in thirties America / by Joseph B. Entin.
Author: Entin, Joseph B.
Publication: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, ©2007.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PS374.E95 E58 2007	Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 325 pages : illustrations; 25 cm.

Summary

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, Sensational Modernism uncovers a rich vein of experimental work by politically progressive artists. Examining images by photographers such as Weegee and Aaron Siskind and fiction by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and Pietro di Donato, Joseph Entin argues that these artists drew attention to the country's most vulnerable residents by using what he calls an "aesthetic of astonishment," focused on startling, graphic images of pain, injury, and prejudice. Traditional portrayals of the poor depicted stoic, passive figures of sentimental suffering or degraded but potentially threatening figures in need of supervision. Sensational modernists sought to shock middle-class audiences into new ways of seeing the nation's impoverished and outcast populations. The striking images these artists created, often taking the form of contorted or disfigured bodies drawn from the realm of the tabloids, pulp magazines, and cinema, represented a bold, experimental form of social aesthetics. Entin argues that these artists created a willfully unorthodox brand of vernacular modernism in which formal avant-garde innovations were used to delineate the conditions, contradictions, and pressures of life on the nation's fringes.

Series Statement

Cultural studies of the United States

Uniform Title

Cultural studies of the United States.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [265]-310) and index.

Contents

Scrutiny, sentiment, sensation : American modernism and the bodies of the dispossessed -- Sensational contact : William Carlos Williams's short fiction and the bodies of new immigrants -- Modernist documentary : Aaron Siskind's Harlem document -- A piece of the body torn out by the roots : James Agee, Tillie Olsen, William Faulkner, and the contingencies of working-class representation -- Monstrous modernism : laboring bodies, wounded workers, and narrative heterogeneity in Pietro di Donato's Christ in concrete -- No man's land : Richard Wright, stereotype, and the racial politics of sensational modernism.

ISBN

9780807831366
0807831360
9780807858349
080785834X

LCCN

2007005601
99817943624

OCLC

ocm83609678
83609678
SCSB-1443167

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library