Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday

Pop Modernism examines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. SuÁrez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. SuÁrez 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 queer and ethnic “others.” Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernism’s major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As SuÁrez shows, what’s at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.

Table of Contents:
ix                   Acknowledgements 1                   Introduction: Modernism, Popular Practice, Noise Noise Abatement 19                   1. Reading Modernity: Vachel Lindsay's Theory of FIlm 50                   2. Reading the Modern City: Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta 80                   3. John Dos Passos's USA, the Popular Media, and Left Documentary Film in the 1930s The Rustle of the Quotidian 119                   4. The Art of Noise: The Gramophone, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the Modernist Discourse Network 141                   5. Joseph Cornell and the Secret Life of Things The Murmur of Otherness 179                   6. Queer Modernism: Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's The Young and Evil 208                   7. Walking with Zombies: Haitian Folklore and Modernist Ethnography in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse 237                   8. Inner-City Surrealism: James Agee, Janice Loeb, and Helen Levitt's In the Street 273                   Notes 315                   Index

About the Author :
Juan A. SuÁrez teaches American Studies at the University of Murcia. He is the author of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema and Jim Jarmusch.

Review :
“In all my years of reading, only once before have I had this kind of positive immediate reaction. I kept wondering, ‘How can SuÁrez possibly know so much, keep all his material straight, write about it with such flair, dig up so many corpses, and say something new about The Waste Land that makes it a less odious poem?’ A book of encyclopedic proportions, Pop Modernism is brilliant, and will set a new path for Modernist Studies.”--Paula Rabinowitz, author of Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism