Documentary modernism and the modern storyteller

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20211267

This project considers select documentary realist photo-books and novels produced in American during the 1930s and 1940s in the context of American literary modernism. Beginning with Men at Work by Lewis Hine, I argue that American artists used a hybrid of documentary realist and literary modernist writing techniques to represent the complicated, and sometimes contradictory identity theories about race, labor, and class circulating in American popular discourse during the 1930s. My project also considers the novel Banjo by Claude McKay, Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston, and the photo-book Twelve Million Black Voices by Richard Wright. By looking at these texts, and reading across lines of genre, my larger project attempts to uncover the ways that the term modernism has been used to flatten the historical, social, and cultural attitudes that informed artists during the first half of the twentieth century. I draw heavily from race theory and feminist theory to analyze how the use of a hybrid aesthetic I call documentary modernism allowed authors to articulate complicated and sometimes incomplete stories about race, gender, and class identity against the larger literary historical context of modernism.