Dei cataloghi nello stile documentario della Grande Depressione; ovvero della loro fortuna nella letteratura degli Stati Uniti

This essay examines a group of literary works (poetry, photo-essay books, scripts of documentary films) written in the U.S. during the Great Depression (1929-1941) in the light of their recurrent use of the catalogue, both as trope and narrative strategy. After an introduction outlining the historical importance of the catalogue within 19th-century American literature and culture (early explorers’ journals; Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; the Puritan jeremiad; almanacs and rural diaries; R. W. Emerson’s aesthetic theories; Walt Whitman’s poetic catalogues and H. D. Thoreau’s inventories in Walden), the essay argues that in the 1930s, a decade deeply marked by economic crisis and witness to a physical and symbolic remapping of the country, the catalogue is chosen as a mimetic narrative strategy apt to encompass America’s hard times as juxtaposed with the abundance of its origins.