A Poetics of the Great Depression: Style and Aesthetics in Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing

Parker, Robert Dale

doi:10.1353/saf.2018.0011

Cited by 2 publications

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“…In contrast to the fragmented style and fractured form characteristic of writers like Joyce and Eliot, for example, Kromer's Waiting for Nothing conveys its narrator's hunger through its spare style and contracted form. Robert Dale Parker notes how the novel ‘stands out among literary evocations of the Great Depression for the way it invents an extravagant style to fit the slow crisis it represents, uncovering the spectacular in the ordinary’ (2018, p. 236). Indeed, it seems, writers facing homelessness embraced literary techniques capable of emulating their own lived experiences of modernity, which were chaotic, itinerant and fragmented in their own specific ways.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘[P]oets unhoused’: Modernism, homelessness and precarity

Ryan

2021

Literature Compass

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In the past 2 or 3 decades, modernist scholarship has largely moved beyond and certainly challenged the mythologised trope of the alienated, exiled modernist writer. Such figures were generally exiled by choice and ‘homeless’ only metaphorically, but their experiences have long been lauded as the ideal conditions for modernist formal innovations. This essay explores the ways in which issues of homelessness and precarity have been considered thus far in modernist scholarship, arguing that more work is needed to account for the particular experiences of writers I here call the ‘homeless modernists’ and the impact of unstable housing upon modernist aesthetics and themes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘[P]oets unhoused’: Modernism, homelessness and precarity

Ryan

2021

Literature Compass

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How to Make a Queer: The Erotics of Begging; or, Down and Out in the Great Depression

Parker¹

2019

American Literature

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Across the fiction and poetry of the Great Depression, when the focus turns to men on the down and out, unable to find work and not knowing where they will find their next meal or place to sleep, a series of representative scenes reappears from one now often-forgotten story, novel, and poem to another. Collectively such scenes, recurring across the literature of the 1930s, offer something like a cousinly alternative, on a far smaller scale, to the 1930s ascendency of documentary and the 1920s and 1930s movement for a proletarian literature. Stories of begging for money or food, for example, took a variety of forms, and they also took on erotic connotations. This article reads the erotics of begging in little-known literature from the Great Depression, especially Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935), and argues that when a man on the down and out “makes” a queer, in effect also queering himself, he queers as well the masses of down-and-out unemployed men whose unloosed gender stirred up a national anxiety about precarious masculinity.

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A Poetics of the Great Depression: Style and Aesthetics in Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing

Cited by 2 publications

References 6 publications

‘[P]oets unhoused’: Modernism, homelessness and precarity

‘[P]oets unhoused’: Modernism, homelessness and precarity

How to Make a Queer: The Erotics of Begging; or, Down and Out in the Great Depression

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