[en] Network Narration in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. TrilogyWesley Beal, Lyon College
Abstract
[en]
Wesley Beal examines John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
(1930-36) to read its complex form — what the author once referred to as a “four-way conveyor system” — as an intricate networking
scheme, and considers it as an archive of early network thinking. Contrary to
traditional readings of U.S.A. that discuss its formal
properties in terms of dispersal and the supposedly ruinous disconnections of modern
life, the paper argues that the interplay of these formal fragments results in a
semiotic web that drives Dos Passos’s narrative strategy toward a totalizing vision
of the nation and, indeed, history. Beal’s paper deals with the progressive widening
of network figuration in American modernism to think the very politics of national
space, and in focusing on the machinic dynamics of Dos Passos’s form, the article
establishes network discourses as the organizing principle of several
pre-digitization modes of production, including Fordism and the modern
corporation.
[en] Missed Connections: The Collective Novel and the MetropolisJ.J. Butts, Assistant Professor of English, Wartburg College
Abstract
[en]
This essay argues that the urban collective novel serves as an important modernist
precursor to network narratives. The collective novel is a literary form, particularly
popular during the 1930s, that explores a wide context through a decentered narrative.
Previous discussions of these novels have focused on them as exemplars of modernist form
in proletarian literature. However, this essay shows another origin for the form in
concerns about the metropolis and mass culture that complicates our understanding. Drawing
on examples from novels by John Dos Passos, Daniel Fuchs, Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst,
William S. Rollins, Jr., and Edwin Seaver it shows how these texts offered not only
radically ambivalent assessments of networked existence but often a pessimistic view of
the possibilities of political community, extending at times to specific critiques of
communist politics. In its conclusion, the essay draws links between these novels and the
cinematic network narratives that became popular in the first decade of the 21st century.
[en] Winesburg, Ohio: A Modernist KlugeMolly Gage, University of Minnesota
Abstract
[en]
This article argues that Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio, while it cannot be considered a text straightforwardly concerned with
technology, offers a modernist version of the story cycle that anticipates the delocalized
and highly structured interconnections facilitated by the network. Unlike today’s
seamlessly embedded networks, however, the prototypical form depicted in Winesburg, Ohio functions as a kluge,
“an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a
distressing whole”
. Anderson’s kluge augurs network technology and therefore suggests that the form
loomed large in modernists’ mind. However, Winesburg, Ohio
illustrates the network’s propensity to foster users’ inner alienation while enabling
their unprecedented connection and thereby warns against the antagonistic quality of the
network’s rhizomatic structure.
[en]
“The Globe is All One”: Wars I Have Seen as
Proto-Network NarrativeStacy Lavin, Independent Scholar
Abstract
[en]
“The Globe is All One: Wars I Have Seen as Proto-Network
Narrative” charts Gertrude Stein's characterization of the human mind as an
data-processor by tracing the conceptual correspondences between her writings and
early information theory, including the work of Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, and
Vannevar Bush. The article argues that Stein first sees language as data that human
beings are compelled to parse in even the most contextless and semantically
“noisy” frameworks, which shapes the purpose and form of Stein's notoriously
difficult prose poem, “Tender Buttons”; the ease with
which meaning can be exchanged emphasizes the importance of the ways in which a given
meaning is selected from a set of possible meanings rather than interpreted or
revealed. While this may simply reiterate the mode of “Tender
Buttons” in different terms, the paper's crucial intervention is in its
positioning of the chance selection of significance as the mode of signification that
animates her wartime memoir “Wars I Have Seen”. Like words
in the poem, political identity in occupied France is unstable and waits to be parsed
in the act of encounters with others and with history. In her narrative's
foregrounding of and experimental play with the conventions of memoir, Stein
discovers the shifting nature of her main character (herself) in a series of
ruminations and chance meetings; an early version of the network narrative emerges in
the nodal structure of the story that undermines chronological and nationalist frames
of signification.
