A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm)

In un long form pubblicato sul New Yorker nell’aprile del 2013, George Packer metteva a confronto la letteratura documentaristica prodotta in seguito alla Grande Depressione americana con quella scaturita dalla Grande recessione del 2007, proponendo un’analisi politico-sociale sia delle due crisi in sé stesse, sia del modo in cui furono e sono tuttora narrate.

In early 1931, Edmund Wilson left his desk job as the literary editor of The New Republic to travel around the stricken country and write a series of articles on the effects of the Depression, then in its second year. The publication of “Axel’s Castle” was about to make him America’s most famous literary critic, but the stock-market crash diverted Wilson’s attention from Mallarmé and Joyce. He was in an apocalyptic mood. The very structure of American society seemed to be collapsing: it was the end of industrial capitalism, of representative democracy, and the start of something radically new. He urged the magazine’s readers to shake themselves loose from the liberalism of John Dewey and Herbert Croly, move left, and “take Communism away from the Communists.” There was nothing unusual in those days about an owl-eyed literary man from the landed gentry, Princeton [class of] 1916, showing up in Virginia coal country.

– Immagine da Wikimedia Commons