Nassim Balestrini and Katharina Fackler, "Introduction: Depicting Destitution across Media"

Keywords: new poverty studies, relationality, intermediality, transmediality

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Linda and Michael Hutcheon, "'Wir arme Leut': Büchner, Berg, and the Activism of Art"

The multimedial art form known as opera may be associated in most people’s minds with courtly entertainment or bourgeois exhibitionism, rather than with engaging timely issues of poverty. Yet unlike the admittedly romanticized bohemian poverty thematized in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, which transmutes suffering into conventionally beautiful music, the stage world of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) (based on Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck [1836-37]) is set in a musical and dramatic idiom that represents the seriousness of human suffering caused by poverty. The power of the story makes the tragedy of the lives of the poor visible, audible, and almost palpable for the audience. This is what Büchner intended, and this is what Berg seized upon. Thanks to the intermedial complexity of opera, audiences actually see and hear a nightmarish reality through Wozzeck’s eyes and ears. We witness—in the sense of bearing witness to—the abuse of this fearful, alienated man by various members of the sadistic, hard-hearted, self-centered ruling class of a society that keeps him in his place through its financial domination and its hypocritical appeals to vacuous moral ideals. And poverty is also a gendered issue in this opera, as in the play. Marie, Wozzeck’s mistress and mother of his child, is as trapped and as devoid of free will and agency as is Wozzeck. But, living a woman’s life of dehumanizing misery, she is also open to sexual exploitation. Fittingly, and tragically, the opera ends with their orphaned child, alone on stage, as he now is in life.

Keywords: Wozzeck, Alban Berg, Georg Büchner, class, gender

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Emily Petermann, "Raggedy Heroes: James Whitcomb Riley’s Portraits of the Poor in 'The Raggedy Man,' 'Little Orphant Annie,' and 'Griggsby’s Station'"

James Whitcomb Riley’s poems featuring lower-class characters present a highly popular literary response to industrialization and urbanization in the 1880s and 1890s. They predominantly portray small-town and rural Midwestern community life in sentimental terms. Yet, this article argues, Riley’s poems do not simply romanticize the poor (and especially children) as picturesque figures. Instead, they possess a double-voicedness that emphasizes middle-class, educated adult readers’ and listeners’ penchant for a kind of nostalgia that comes at the expense of a serious reckoning with socioeconomic suffering and the production of inequality. Reading oral language and written language as separate media highlights the social distance between the lyrical personae and the readers. Riley’s ambivalent representation of the working poor and of poverty-stricken rural environments is echoed in the ambivalence of the medial juxtaposition of the oral and the written.

Keywords: popular poetry; Gilded Age; sentimentality; nostalgia; orality

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Margit Peterfy, "Poverty in Color and in Black and White: Proximity and Distance in Intermedial Representations of Destitution"

In James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the representation of the life of tenant farmers strives for utmost veracity, making use of a documentary or indexical encoding, both in the photographs taken by Evans and in the texts by Agee.  In this paper, the hitherto unexamined role of color is analyzed from an intermedial perspective, i.e., with special attention to the representational codes and traditions associated with each medium, the visual and the textual. While the monochrome photographs have generally been understood as participating in the tradition of the documentary style of the Great Depression, the elaborate descriptions of colorful scenes in Agee’s text deserve more critical attention than they have received so far. This includes Agee’s metapoetic reflections on his own work, in which he repeatedly declares that his writing is less “truthful” than Evans’s photographs. However, it is, in fact, in these colorful descriptions that the world of the farmers is presented more fully and, in a certain sense, more realistically, given that the world is not monochrome, not even that of destitute farmers. The paper at hand emphasizes that the conventions and perceptual habits of representation need to be studied in the light of representational traditions and historical media codes.

Keywords: James Agee, Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, color, Great Depression

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Klaus and Susanne Rieser, "Poverty and Agency in Rural Noir Film"

This article examines eight fiction films on rural poverty in the U.S. that were released between 2008 and 2018: Ballast (2008), Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Frozen River (2008), The Glass Castle (2017), Leave No Trace (2018), The Rider (2017), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Winter’s Bone (2010). We argue that, overall, these films offer accurate representations of key aspects of present-day U.S. poverty; they successfully create empathy and foster audience identification with the destitute. While these movies metamorphose poverty statistics into gripping narratives by means of individualizing structural problems into personal experience, they also expose audiences to the fundamental experience of poverty – notably food and housing insecurity and the constant anxiety of maintaining or losing kinship, community, or public support. Rural noir films, thus, do not merely depict destitution; they engage the viewers in the plight of their heroines and heroes by equipping these characters with courage, creativity, and resolve – in short, with agency. In our analysis, we focus on how accurately the films document the lived experience of scarcity, what representational strategies the films use to present the experience of poverty to the audience, and how these poetics of representation are embedded in cultural scripts such as ‘the deserving poor.’ Moreover, in an intermedial comparison, the aesthetic repertory of these twenty-first-century films is brought in alignment with the most iconic representation of U.S. poverty, that is, FSA photography – in particular the work of Walker Evans.

Keywords: U.S. poverty; rural; narrative film; agency; intermediality

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Simone Knewitz, "Longing for Appalachia: Poverty, Whiteness, and the Aesthetics of Nostalgia in Hillbilly Elegy"

In the U.S. cultural imaginary, the Appalachian region has long been associated with the problem of (white) poverty. In the often rather reductive media narratives that emerged after the 2016 presidential election, the region figures as the home of a deteriorated class of white Americans whose resentment of the Washington political elite has given rise to the populist political leadership of Donald Trump. This essay scrutinizes the cross-medial tradition of representing Appalachia by comparatively reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis (2016) and its fiction film adaptation, directed by Ron Howard and released by Netflix in 2020, in order to gauge their contribution to literary and pop-cultural engagement with destitution. Both works crucially rely on a rhetoric and aesthetics of nostalgia in their depiction of Appalachian “hillbillies” who appear simultaneously as representatives of a purer, “authentic” (white) culture, and as a degenerated people. The article argues that nostalgia here needs to be conceptualized as an aesthetic strategy which functions as a distancing practice and thereby helps to reproduce dominant discourses and hegemonic relations. The projection of nostalgia onto the white working class ultimately veils its class politics: If the existence of poor whites proves that the American Dream of upward mobility is a lie, then nostalgic representations of white Others reinforce the image of the U.S. as a meritocracy and justify neoliberal economic structures.

Keywords: nostalgia, white working class, adaptation, memoir, meritocracy

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