Why did the Mariner Press cover all of the books that make up Dos Passos' USA with media objects? Typewriter-for obvious reasons, Dos Passos characters are obsessed with the materiality of print. The smell of fresh ink, the stain of the ink (components) over the hands of the characters. Microphone covers 1919. A book about WW1, not yet the fuhrer, the time when regular man begin to control the media. The turn of the Jazz Age. The Big Money--> camera, just like Dos Passos coming out through the aperture of the cameraeye.
How does the device of 5 characters unified by chance (so far through Moorehouse) suggest a modernism predilection for the narrative more than just the interjecting camera eye and intrusion of newsprint mass media, disjointed and acontextual enough to read like telegraphic Dada/ ad libbed / noise over a slightly mistuned radio blaring the BBC.
Striking how casual the mention and reporting about IWW, socialism, Lenin, and anarchism are. How realistic is this? The book comes off reading like a distracted Upton Sinclair who forgets to include the propaganda. Even the labor-men and Pullman strikers aren't heroes or martyrs. Socialism also seems like a good idea but they forget to think about the next day and time marches through twenty years. Is Dos Passos interjecting this more than a realistic/naturalistic narrative? If the cameraeye, newsprint, and Wikipedia entries were left out would this just be Hemingway without the staccato?
All five main characters report, but do they all narrate, inscribe, ink, stain, or mar the texture of the narrative. Dos Passos inverts the narrative rhythm of modernity. The steams of consciousness, cacophony of snippets and blinks, becomes what's skimmed over instead of the rise and fall of men and women of the promise and fail of the fall of capitalism. Nowhere else in capitalism's reign did social movements and not near economic meltdown bring surplus value to the brink. Moorehouse is the most integral to this narrative of spin and resonating between the fabrics of international trade, inter-spliced strife between management and labor and the rise of the glass and
How does the device of 5 characters unified by chance (so far through Moorehouse) suggest a modernism predilection for the narrative more than just the interjecting camera eye and intrusion of newsprint mass media, disjointed and acontextual enough to read like telegraphic Dada/ ad libbed / noise over a slightly mistuned radio blaring the BBC.
Striking how casual the mention and reporting about IWW, socialism, Lenin, and anarchism are. How realistic is this? The book comes off reading like a distracted Upton Sinclair who forgets to include the propaganda. Even the labor-men and Pullman strikers aren't heroes or martyrs. Socialism also seems like a good idea but they forget to think about the next day and time marches through twenty years. Is Dos Passos interjecting this more than a realistic/naturalistic narrative? If the cameraeye, newsprint, and Wikipedia entries were left out would this just be Hemingway without the staccato?
All five main characters report, but do they all narrate, inscribe, ink, stain, or mar the texture of the narrative. Dos Passos inverts the narrative rhythm of modernity. The steams of consciousness, cacophony of snippets and blinks, becomes what's skimmed over instead of the rise and fall of men and women of the promise and fail of the fall of capitalism. Nowhere else in capitalism's reign did social movements and not near economic meltdown bring surplus value to the brink. Moorehouse is the most integral to this narrative of spin and resonating between the fabrics of international trade, inter-spliced strife between management and labor and the rise of the glass and
