Body And Soul: The Making Of American Modernism

by Crunden, Robert M.

• ISBN13: 9780465014859
• ISBN10: 0465014852
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-12-18
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

In this book Robert Crunden puts the "jazz" back in the Jazz Age. Jazz was America's greatest contribution to the Modernist movement, yet it is much overlooked. When we hear the term "Jazz Age," we conjure the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, not Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. In order to correct this imbalance, Crunden re-introduces us to these musical luminaries who gave the era its name as he traces the early history of jazz from New Orleans to Chicago to New York. While Crunden emphasizes music over literature and the visual arts, he never fails to map the complex cross-currents of literature that passed between jazz musicians and their "Lost Generation" peers, a veritable pageant of the glittering personalities of the day-James Joyce, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein.

Author Biography

Robert Crunden was Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. His previous books include Ministers of Reform and American Salons. He died in March 1999.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Overture: The Critical World of Paul Rosenfeld	1	(36)
THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA
Edgard Varese and the Sound of the City	37	(22)
Paul Strand and the Sight of the City	59	(16)
John Dos Passos and the Physiology of the City	75	(32)
William Carlos Williams and the Suburban Doctor's Eye	107	(26)
Charles Sheeler and the Cubism of Country Life	133	(14)
DIFFERENT DRUMMERS
The Pull of Chicago	147	(34)
The Bleaching of the Blues	181	(62)
THE ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE
Fighting Free of the First Modernists	243	(30)
Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe	273	(16)
Gertrude Stein/Sherwood Anderson/Ernest Hemingway	289	(22)
Igor Stravinsky/George Antheil	311	(30)
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Jean Toomer's Quest for Cosmic Consciousness	341	(8)
Wallace Stevens and the Satisfactions of Belief	349	(16)
Arthur G. Dove and the Stieglitz Circle's Equivalents	365	(12)
Claude Bragdon's Other Lives	377	(16)
Margaret Anderson's Search for Ecstasy	393	(22)
Coda: With Words	415	(4)
Malcolm Cowley
Notes	419	(34)
List of Abbreviations Used in Notes	453	(2)
About the Author	455	(4)
Index	459