2024 Woodman Lecture

This year’s Woodman Memorial Lecture will be held on Wednesday, November 13 from 4:30pm to 6:00pm in RAWL 2082. Robert Dale Parker, Frank Hodgins Professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will give a talk entitled "The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression."

The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression
A vast body of unstudied and understudied fiction and poetry portrays extreme poverty in the United States during the Great Depression: people starving on the street or half-starving on welfare, people who often don’t know where they’ll find something to eat that night or whether they’ll find someplace to sleep. They spend the night on park benches or in filthy flophouses, or they trade sex for food and shelter, or they starve. Time itself changes. For the starving poor standing for hours and hours in a breadline, the speed of modern culture slows down. From an age so immersed in despair and suffering that many writers came to doubt the very idea of literary aesthetics, this project rescues a vast archive of literary analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory. It shapes a collective portrait and interpretation of a nearly lost literary history that represents a nation, its crisis, and its literature of crisis from the bottom up rather than from the top down.