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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Hefner, Brooks. "“‘You’ve Got to Be Modernistic’: American Vernacular Modernism, 1910-1937”," English, City University of New York, May 2009. Advisor: Marc Dolan
This study interrogates the commonly held assumption that literary modernism broadly conceived was an exclusively international, cosmopolitan, and elite movement violently opposed to the commercial marketplace. The thesis of this project argues that modernist literary experimentation appeared in many popular contexts in American literature of the early twentieth century. I call this aesthetically experimental popular writing vernacular modernism, a reference to its reliance on American slang and to its anti-elitist position in the cultural hierarchy. This vernacular modernism drew its inspiration from H.L. Mencken’s study The American Language, a work that implicitly allies the American vernacular with both formal and linguistic innovation as well as a harsh critique of the same nineteenth-century bourgeois gentility that canonical modernist writers rejected.
Throughout this period, writers in a variety of popular genres were experimenting with language, subjectivity, and representation in works published alongside well-recognized modernist texts. To demonstrate this phenomenon, I apply a combination of cultural studies and formalism to fiction in four genres: humor writing, the Jewish-American memoir, hard-boiled crime fiction, and the urban novel of the Harlem Renaissance. Ring Lardner and Anita Loos, Anzia Yezierska and Michael Gold, Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, and Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay serve as paired subjects that transform their respective genres in ways analogous to the literary experimentation of high modernists. Understanding these popular writers as vernacular modernists allows a thorough consideration of the authentic dialogue between experimental vernacular language and modernist aesthetics, enabling fruitful new readings of mid-1930s American modernists (William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Dos Passos) engaged with regionalism, racial and ethnic identity, and working-class consciousness.
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