Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America

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.'

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.