Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America

"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"--

Introduction: Poetry, Modernity, Crisis; Part I. Historical Materialism and the Materials of History: 1. Thinking with Things: Language, Commodities, and the Social Ontologies of Objects in Louis Zukofsky's 'A'-8 and 9; 2. New Ways of Seeing: Muriel Rukeyser's 'Book of the Dead' and the Politics of Documentary Photography; 3. Pieces of the Body Torn out by the Roots: Charles Reznikoff's 1934 Testimony and the Idiom of American Violence; Part II. Ethnographic Modernity and Its Discontents: 4. Vernacular Technologies: The Folksong Collector, the Phonograph, and Blues Authenticity in Sterling A. Brown's Southern Road; 5. Interlopers out of a Pale Land: Norman Macleod's Ethnographic Regionalism and Antimodernism in New Mexico; 6. Object Lessons: Ethnographic Surrealism and the Poetics of Detachment in Lorine Niedecker's New Goose; Coda: The Poet as Consumer.