Voices of persuasion

The 1930s concern with recording the speaking voice is virtually unrivaled in American cultural history. In that decade, scores of writers traveled into the field to record the voices of African Americans, American Indians, migrant workers, tenant farmers, and immigrants. In this innovative study, Michael E. Staub recasts 1930s cultural history by analyzing those genres so characteristic of the Depression era: genres that relied on a presumed relationship to real experience for their effect and that sought to persuade their audiences of urgent political truths. Demonstrating the seldom-discussed multicultural diversity of Depression-era literature, and paying special attention to narrative strategies for representing the speech of disinherited and minority peoples, Staub shows how several writers from the thirties anticipated dilemmas and perspectives currently engaging cultural studies critics. New interpretations of such canonized authors as James Agee, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, John G. Neihardt, and Tillie Olsen are coupled with critical discussions of previously little-known works of ethnography, journalism, oral history, and polemical fiction. Voices of Persuasion sheds new light on the relationship between art and politics in the 1930s. It will interest all who are concerned with the problematic relationship between representation and social reality and their mutual inextricability.