Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s (review)

Amy Koritz's Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s is a lucid and insightful cross-genre study of the engagement between cultural producers and the transformations that took effect in American society in the decade often characterized as the Jazz Age. Acknowledging the limitations of using a decade as the lens through which to view the complexities of social and economic change, Koritz nonetheless demonstrates that playwrights, dancers, novelists, and commentators all wrestled with a coherent set of developments in the 1920s. These included the "emergence of rationalized work processes and expert professionalism, the advent of mass markets and the consequent necessity of consumerism as a behavior and ideology, and the urbanization of the population, in concert with the invention of urban planning and the recognition of specifically urban subjectivities." (1)

As Koritz states in her introduction, the book is motivated by a pair of goals. The first is to "add a new series of case studies to the rich and insightful scholarship linking the cultural realm with the material conditions and ways of understanding the world that it both shapes and is shaped by." (4) Koritz divides her case studies into six chapters, with two each devoted to drama, dance, and fiction. The opening chapter examines representations of work in the dramas of Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Sophie Treadwell; the second explores the tensions between consumerism and marital commitment for affluent young (white) women in the middlebrow "flapper plays" of Rachel Crothers. Chapter 3 surveys the discourse of expertise that arose to manage the gendered, raced, and classed anxieties surrounding the Charleston dance craze in the '20s, while chapter 4 focuses on the strategies deployed by modern dancer Martha Graham, including the cultivation of an authentic self, to carve out a professional status for herself as a female artist. In the last two chapters, Koritz turns to the fiction of Anzia Yezierska, whose short stories and novels depicted the communal world of the Jewish ghetto, even as the rise of consumerism and mass markets accelerated assimilation; and, finally, to a comparison of John Dos Passos's novel Manhattan Transfer and the commentary of Lewis Mumford, both of whom worried over the effects of urban planning on the individual lives of urban residents.

Koritz's second, more far-reaching stated goal is to argue for the relevance of the humanities to discussions about social change and public policy. Inspired by philosopher Martha Nussbaum's assertion that multiple genres of knowledge are necessary for the creation of just policies and practices, Koritz laments the "deficits of a disciplinary, rather than a problem-based, organization of knowledge" (138) that, for instance, have prevented cultural observers from reading Dos Passos and Mumford in tandem despite their shared concerns.

Koritz succeeds in both goals, exposing connections across disciplinary demarcations and showing that the arts—in terms of both the problems they address and the rhetorical methods they use, such as narrative and metaphor—are valuable sites for analyzing issues that dog society at large. Yet Koritz also uncovers a paradox: artists were, to a great extent, heavily invested in and complicit with the erection of the very disciplinary (and class- and race-based) divisions that her study points to as regrettable. Koritz makes note of this contradiction in her conclusion, but one is left to wonder how it ultimately alters her book's basic premise. One also wonders how Koritz's own disciplinary location in literary studies may have contributed to the dominating textual focus of her study (and the shortage of visual images). How, for example, might her appraisal of race and modernity have been amplified had her discussion of the African American-derived Charleston centered on various practitioners' embodiment of the dance, rather than on the discursive commentary that surrounded white flappers' association with it? Still, Culture Makers presents a compelling case for interdisciplinarity and should be useful to readers across the humanities with an interest in 1920s American culture.