Special Issue Proposal: ”Theorizing Connectivity: Modernism and the Network Narrative”

Recent scholarship has identified the “network narrative” as an emergent genre responding to globalization and its accompanying changes in technology and social relations. Finding recent popularity in films like Crash (2005), Syriana (2006), and Babel (2006)—just to name a few of the narrow slice of American examples— the network narrative has become synonymous with a six-degrees-of-separation model of connectivity. As such, it has become a common feature of literary production, bringing with it an equally common recognition among film and literature scholars. Film critic David Bordwell, for example, surveys a vast number of such recent films and describes the network narrative precisely in the terms of the six-degrees-of-separation mode of connectivity represented in these films. Yet, as this special issue demonstrates, the network narrative is a far broader, more complex, and older genre than Bordwell’s analysis would suggest.

To be sure, the network itself has become an increasingly familiar figure over the last three decades—associated with the work of theorists such as Manuel Castells, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Bruno Latour, and characterizing a host of narratives such as DeLillo�? ��s Underworld (1997). This group of essays will consider the network narrative—a genre that represents human connectedness and its accompanying group formations—as we find it in modernism, a period that may well mark the beginning of the network's path to its figural ascendancy in the late 1900s.

Modernism offers a key developmental stage for the network. The social conditions during the period were fertile for the development of the network: the international conflicts, urbanization, immigration, and technological developments that defined the era called for a radical reconception of social relations. With “Trans-National America” (1916), Randolph Bourne provided such a reconception, noting the failure of the melting-pot metaphor and suggesting its replacement by “a federation of clusters”—a nodal formation if ever there was one. These social conditions were matched by modernism’s trademark formal experimentation. Indeed, modernism’s dual insistence on the fragment and on totality tends to replicate node and network at the formal level. And in many cases, modernist works anticipate dynamics later associated with the Information Age and its distinctive set of mediations.

We have two primary goals in mind for this issue. First, we want to provide a broader theoretical framework for the possibilities of the network that expands on the one-dimensional understanding of that genre as an outgrowth of the six-degrees theorem. Second, we want to explore how this particular narrative genre, which has only gained theoretical attention in the recent digital age, has shaped some of the most distinctive characteristics of literary modernism and has contributed to the rise of the network as a figural hallmark of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Each author will investigate these early moments in thinking the network, exploring different texts and how they anticipate or even prefigure the connectivity dynamics that come to define the latter part of the century. The issue begins with an introduction by the co-editors, Wesley Beal and Stacy Lavin, who will build this historical case for the network narrative as a genre and for its inception in the modernist period while highlighting some of the important insights of the volume’s contributors.

Evan Mauro, from McMaster? University, identifies a complicated historical trajectory between “mass” and “network,” terms often conceived as polarities. His genealogy of the figure of the network, focusing on D.W. Griffith’s epic feature film Intolerance (1916), traces points of contact and divergence between network and mass. By now Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the political impact of film that resides in its ability to shock the masses into class consciousness is well known. In Griffith, we have an earlier, liberal cosmopolitan version of the same wish—in Vachel Lindsay’s 1922 analysis of Intolerance, to “give the people back to the people,” in a direct and unmediated way, by putting crowds and multitudes on the screen. This paper will show how Griffith’s crowd scenes, his four overlaid plot lines, and his oft-noted cross-wiring of montage technique with linear narrative are symptomatic of a liberal ideology in crisis as it makes contact with the (early twentieth century) global: that is, as it confronts the realities of American imperial ambition and international left radicalism. Comparable concerns motivate Hardt and Negri’s desire for networked social formations; Mauro’s paper will raise questions about the historical viability of their political project.

Molly Gage, from The University of Minnesota, commences the issue by mobilizing the “kluge,” a term first defined by J.W. Granholm in the February 1962 issue of Datamation,” as a metaphor by which to yoke Walter Benjamin’s figures of the storyteller and the critic to analyze modernism’s network narratives. Through the kluge, “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole,” Gage offers a way to read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as a Benjaminian radicality. Criticism of Winesburg, Ohio has often focused on the tension between alienation and interconnection inaugurated by “The Book of the Grotesque,” the first story of Anderson’s story cycle. Accordingly, Winesburg, Ohio is commonly considered a psychological text illustrating the emotional estrangement produced by the personal fanaticism that severs individual from society. Gage’s paper departs from this criticism to consider the grotesques that people Anderson’s work as the ill-assorted parts of a kluge’s designedly haphazard whole. She suggests that the parts are unified into a cycle not only by the town of Winesburg but by the narrator’s casting of the young reporter George Willard in the role of emblematic kluge designer.

JJ Butts, from Hunter College in New York City, offers a reading of the collective novel as a generic theorization of the network. With “Missed Connections: The Collective Novel and the Metropolis,” Butts argues that the collective novel, a form identified by Granville Hicks in the 1930s and associated with John Dos Passos, Albert Halper, and Josephine Herbst, among others, offers a compelling example of modernist connectivity narrative. Collective novels proliferate character plots and utilize documentary materials to keep the focus on the social aggregate rather than individuals. These strategies make them particularly well-suited to exploring political geographies, and critics often situate the collective novel as the outgrowth of the proletarian literary movement of the 1930s. This paper contests that view, arguing that the form instead emerged as a response to metropolitan complexity and mass culture. The paper examines the implications of these concerns for the form’s political efficacy.

Wesley Beal, from the University of Florida, offers a theory of the modern network narrative, arguing that such a narrative operates on three modes of mediations: a characterological mode that performs the six-degrees-of-separation theorem, a material mode that focuses on concrete mediations like railroads or commodity flows, and a spontaneous mode that represents unmediated networking in the figure of the crowd. He turns to Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy and its full integration of each of these modes, part of what Dos Passos referred to as the trilogy’s “four-way conveyor system.” The paper argues that Dos Passos’s narrative strategy offers a totalizing vision of network schemes, which themselves totalize, and engages the formative developments in social organization and technological mediations of the 1930s.

Stacy Lavin, from Georgia Tech, reads Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen (1945) as a memoir experiment that records a shift from 19th- to 20th-century modes of global connectivity. The totalization of the globe, for Stein, characterizes “the 19th century,” which anachronistically extends to the end of the World Wars. Here, the century “turns” when geopolitical and technological mobilizations make the globe a known object. This paper shows how Stein deconstructs the 19th-century mode of connectivity by aligning her plays on memoir conventions with the military, scientific, and technological aspects of the episteme. And it highlights moments where Stein anticipates—through formal experiment and reflective exposition—the psychological, political, and cultural dynamics embedded in emergent networks of information and international relations.

From SUNY-Buffalo, Matt Garite offers “Network Narratives and the Depiction of Global Catastrophe,” which closes the issue by turning the focus to late modernism. He argues that the basic components of the network narrative are put to use in works of late-modernist apocalyptic science fiction like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972). Like Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, they each draw upon modernist techniques like cross-cutting and montage to depict a revolving cast of apparently unrelated characters, until finally—in a moment of epiphany—each novel shows how the lives of these characters converge. Brunner’s novels predate “connectivity theory” and the recent global integration of capitalist markets, but a concern with global relationships still informs his work. Here, though, it’s not capitalism itself but rather ecological crises (overpopulation in Stand On Zanzibar and pollution in The Sheep Look Up) that link characters together within a larger planetary framework. The network narrative is the device that enables Brunner to trace the various geographically dispersed relationships and chains of effectivity that culminate in these global catastrophes.

Table of Contents

Introduction by co-editors Wesley Beal and Stacy Lavin

1. “D.W. Griffith’s Cinema of Liberal Crisis” by Evan Mauro

2. “Winesburg, Ohio: A Modernist Kluge” by Molly Gauge

3. “Missed Connections: The Collective Novel and the Metropolis” by JJ Butts

4. “Network Narrative and Network Narration in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy” by Wesley Beal

5. “The Globe is All One: Connecting to the 20th-century International Network in Wars I Have Seen” by Stacy Lavin

6. “Network Narratives and the Depiction of Global Catastrophe” by Matt Garite

-- Main.mkohnen - 26 Sep 2008