Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression

Jani Scandura

Published by Duke University Press 2007

Down in the Dumps

Place, Modernity, American Depression

Jani Scandura

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390336

Overview
Contents

About this book

A cultural studies account of America during the 1930s as seen through Key West, Harlem, Hollywood, and Reno.

Author / Editor information

Jani Scandura is Associate Professor of English and Co-Founder of the Space and Place Research Collective at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital.

Reviews

“A brilliant meditation on the centrality of detritus, debris, and depression to the cultural history and geography of American modernity. Jani Scandura’s book is a standout in a crowded field: innovative in its method and composition, elegantly written, and thickly documented, it is destined to become a key text in the new modernist studies.”—Rita Felski, author of Literature after Feminism

“Part history, part ethnography, part self-reflection, and part psychogeography, Down in the Dumps performs a wholly original encounter with the American 1930s. Jani Scandura displaces the national economic narrative and the archive of migration narratives, WPA guides, and leftist manifestoes with local stories that transform the Great Depression from an economic tragedy into a tragicomic account of site-specific modernities.”—Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Images Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xv
Introduction. A geography of depression Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Reno. The divorce factory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	30
2 Key west. The nation and the corpse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
3 Harlem. Blue-penciled place Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
4 Hollywood(l and). Wax, fire, insomnia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Afterword. The prison and the pentagon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	234
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	246
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	284
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	302

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 344
Illustrations
- Other: 111 illustrations

eBook

Published: May 7, 2008
ISBN: 9780822390336