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theses

Literary modernism and the historical study of folklore entered American cultural life at the same time as responses to similar anxieties regarding the national present. This dissertation argues that the overlap at the beginning of the twentieth-century between these seemingly contradictory movements—the “modern” looking forward and the “folk” backward—explains a broader cultural shift in American self-representation in the ensuing decades. As other scholars have shown, there is often little to distinguish the projects of early twentieth-century literary and artistic modernists from those of anthropologists and folklorists. However, as both movements developed, the notion of who and what counted as “folk” became incrementally detached from its social-scientific origins to become the stuff of myth. The formal experimentation of modernist style broke down older ideas about the “authenticity” of folk culture by showing its malleability. Popular culture inherited this deconstruction, but now, with the exigencies of the mass market in radio and film, it began to insist once again on folk authenticity and promote it as a national ideal. By the 1920s and 1930s, the folk was increasingly emptied of its ethnographic specificity and transformed into a commonly used term with little actual content. The “American folk” was born.

ETD_6297

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Brian Inman Becker

doi:10.7282/T3XS5X7M

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.