About the Book:Pop Modernismexamines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. Surez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. Surez demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queer and ethnic others. Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernisms major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As Surez shows, whats at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.Table of Contents: ix Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Modernism, Popular Practice, Noise Noise Abatement 19 1. Reading Modernity: Vachel Lindsay’s Theory of FIlm 50 2. Reading the Modern City: Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta 80 3. John Dos Passos’s USA, the Popular Media, and Left Documentary Film in the 1930s The Rustle of the Quotidian 119 4. The Art of Noise: The Gramophone, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the Modernist Discourse Network 141 5. Joseph Cornell and the Secret Life of Things The Murmur of Otherness 179 6. Queer Modernism: Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’sThe Young and Evil 208 7. Walking with Zombies: Haitian Folklore and Modernist Ethnography in Zora Neale Hurston’sTell My Horse 237 8. Inner-City Surrealism: James Agee, Janice Loeb, and Helen Levitt’sIn the Street 273 Notes 315 Index