“Social representations within American Modernism” (261-283) deals with the basic ingredients of modernity: the city with its rhythms, its stimuli and movement, human culture marked by the awareness of dispersion, of annihilation, by the density of collective patterns of thought and behaviour. The critic’s main argument is that both film and photography that frame the intensity of modern life, and literature that isolates fragments of human existence in poetic prose participate in “a demotic urge to represent the plebeian, the everyday, the regular Joe” (266). In doing so, they provide new visions of an America entangled in its own contradictions, ready to get rid of its old models and clichés and yet reluctant to embrace all the implications of modern consumption and urbanization. The essay includes photographs that emphasize the iconicity of the new American environment marked by “a new form of transience” (278) and by the interplay between popular culture, politics and aesthetics.