Description
Book SynopsisTells the story of the United States during the Great Depression through portraits of four different locales: Reno, Harlem, Key West, and Hollywood. This book introduces the concept of "depressive modernity." It escorts its readers through Reno's 1930s divorce factory, where couples from across the United States came to quickly break bonds.
Trade Review“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 LiteratureTable of ContentsImages ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: A Geography of Depression 1
1. Reno: The Divorce Factory 30
2. Key West: The Nation and the Corpse 70
3. Harlem: Blue-Penciled Place 122
4. Hollywood(land): Wax, Fire, Insomnia 186
Afterword: The Prison and the Pentagon 234
Notes 247
Works Cited 285
Index 303
