Vox pop modernism: Technology, commonality, and difference in American literature of the 1930s

Focusing on the American 1930s, Vox Pop Modernism analyzes the powerfully resonant tensions between organic and technological tropes for representing the organizational rational of social life in modernity. The texts and writers examined in this dissertation approach the trope of the collective voice with sharp awareness of its implications in technologies of social mediation for producing the expressive valences of universality, commonality, and difference. Through interrelated allusions to the technological and vocal media, they attempt to represent the various ways in which these symbols and systems---invested with the power to mediate social experience---manage the complementary needs of articulating and circulating socio-subjective concepts of universality and difference, cultural commonality and dissension. Case studies include novels by John Dos Passos, Younghill Kang, and Henry Roth; poetry by Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and Carl Sandburg; and ethnographic essays by Zora Neale Hurston. Readings of these texts are grounded in contextualizing analysis of the Federal Writers' Project; New Deal era films produced by the Rural Electrification Administration and the Farm Security Administration; and 1930s radio programs such as Vox Pop and Americans All, Immigrants All. In negotiating the competing claims of universal and particular expressions, the texts examined in this dissertation speak to the period's preoccupation with the collectivizing tropes of voice and technology, as well as anticipate the politics of voice central to the development of ethnic literary movements and multiculturalism in the later twentieth century. Contributing a gainfully interdisciplinary treatment of the tropes expressive of the collective ideals and menaces of the 1930s and beyond, this dissertation integrates findings of new media studies, cultural studies, historical approaches to literary studies, as well as new readings of more obscure texts from the American 1930s.