Down in the Dumps ：Place, Modernity, American Depression

Publication subTitle ：Place, Modernity, American Depression

Author： Jani Scandura  

Publisher： Duke University Press‎

Publication year： 2008

E-ISBN: 9780822390336

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780822336662

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9780822336549

Subject： K712.5 imperial era (1898 ~)

Keyword： United States -- Civilization -- 1918-1945., United States -- Civilization -- 1945-, National characteristics, American., Depressions -- 1929 -- United States., Depression, Mental -- Social aspects -- United States., Memory -- Social aspects -- United States., Reno (Nev.) -- History -- 20th century -- Sources., Key West (Fla.) -- History -- 20th century -- Sources., Harlem (New York, N.Y.) -- History -- 20th century -- Sources., Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) -- History -- 20th century -- Sources.

Language： ENG

Access to resources Favorite

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Description

Mucking around in the messy terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era “dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural, ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill. Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory, language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.

An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status

Chapter

Contents

Images

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Geography of Depression

1 Reno: The Divorce Factory

2 Key West: The Nation and the Corpse

3 Harlem: Blue-Penciled Place

4 Hollywood (Land) Wax, Fire, Insomnia

Notes

Works Cited

Index

The users who browse this book also browse


No browse record.