Voices of persuasion : politics of representation in 1930s America

Bibliographic Information

Voices of persuasion : politics of representation in 1930s America

Michael E. Staub

(Cambridge studies in American literature and culture, 78)

Cambridge University Press, 1994

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Note

Bibliography: p. 160-170

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In this innovative study, Michael Staub recasts 1930s cultural history by analysing those genres so characteristic of the Depression era: Staub argues that several thirties writers - precisely because of their encounters with disinherited peoples - anticipated the dilemmas poststructuralist theory would identify; an awareness of the ambiguousness of historical truth, and the impossibility of representing reality without being complicit in its distortion. New interpretations of such canonised authors as James Agee, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, John G. Neihardt and Tille Olsen are coupled with critical discussions of previously little-known works of ethnography, journalism, oral history and polemical fiction. This book will interest all who are concerned with the problematic relationship between representation and social reality and their mutual inextricability.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • 1. Spoken testimony, Unwritten History
  • 2. You won't hear it nicely John Dos Passos and James Agee
  • 3. Telling native American history John Neihardt, William Benson and Ruth Underhill
  • 4. Talking black, talking back Zora Neale Hurston
  • 5. Giving the people voice Tillie Olsen and the Communist Press
  • Notes
  • Bibliography.

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