"A New Appropriate Poetry": Gender and the Language Track in Muriel Rukeyser's A Place to Live.

Amid the active landscape of documentary film in the early 1940s, the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a short screenplay advocating for public housing in Philadelphia. Despite its distinguished production team and Oscar nomination, A Place to Live (Brandon Films, 1941) has not been contextualized by scholarly work. This essay considers Rukeyser's narrative innovations as A Place to Live follows one family's desire for publicly funded housing. Rukeyser uses montage to establish a dialectical contrast between the conventions of male enunciatory authority and the film's female subject, who rises to an identificatory position that requires audience response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]