Anne Massey. The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59. Manchester: Manchester University Press; distributed by St. Martin's Press, New York, N. Y. 1996. Pp. viii, 160. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. ISBN 0-7190-4245-3.

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-169
Author(s):  
John Laffey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Independent Group

Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-213
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The Great Depression

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.

Norman Rockwell and American Mass Culture: The Crisis of Representation in the Great Depression

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 323-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Graebner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Social Success ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
Saturday Evening Post ◽  
Mutual Insurance ◽  
Norman Rockwell

By the summer of 1929, Norman Rockwell was a full-fledged success. At age thirty-five, he had been creating covers for the Saturday Evening Post for thirteen years. A generation of American youth had grown up beguiled by his illustrations for Boys' Life, St. Nicholas, and the Boy Scouts' calendar. For more than a decade, Rockwell's artistry had helped sell Adams Black Jack gum, American Mutual insurance, Sun Maid raisins, and Coca-Cola. As this commercial success modulated into social success, Rockwell, whose father had risen to middle-class respectability in the offices of a New York City textile firm, found himself living the good life in the artists' colony of suburban New Rochelle. The drab apartments and boardinghouses of his youth and adolescence had been left behind. He joined the Larchmont Yacht Club, golfed in clothes from Brooks Brothers, and hosted elaborate parties worthy of Jay Gatsby.

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