Modernism, popular practice, noise -- Reading modernity : Vachel Lindsay's theory of film -- Reading the modern city : Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta -- John Dos Passos's USA, the popular media, and left documentary film in the 1930s -- The art of noise : the gramophone, T.S. Eliot's The waste land, and the modernist discourse network -- Joseph Cornell and the secret life of things -- Queer modernism : Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's The young and evil -- Walking with zombies : Haitian folklore and modernist ethnography in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell my horse -- Inner-city surrealism : James Agee, Janice Loeb, and Helen Levitt's In the street
Summary
Showing that experimental art in the early 20th century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life, this work demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queers and ethnic 'others.'
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-314) and index
