The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos: A Collection and Study


Book Description

The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos: A Collection and Study presents for the first time a comprehensive, fully illustrated record and exploration of the body of visual art created by the groundbreaking narrative innovator whose interartistic fictions helped define early twentieth-century modernism.




The Cambridge History of American Modernism


Book Description

The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.




Sound Recording Technology and American Literature


Book Description

Phonographs, tapes, stereo LPs, digital remix - how did these remarkable technologies impact American writing? This book explores how twentieth-century writers shaped the ways we listen in our multimedia present. Uncovering a rich new archive of materials, this book offers a resonant reading of how writers across several genres, such as John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, William S. Burroughs, and others, navigated the intermedial spaces between texts and recordings. Numerous scholars have taken up remix - a term co-opted from DJs and sound engineers - as the defining aesthetic of twenty-first century art and literature. Others have examined modernism's debt to the phonograph. But in the gap between these moments, one finds that the reciprocal relationship between the literary arts and sonic technologies continued to evolve over the twentieth century. A mix of American literary history, sound studies, and media archaeology, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars, students, and audiophiles.




John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling


Book Description

“I never could keep the world properly divided into gods and demons for very long,” wrote John Dos Passos, whose predilection toward nuance and tolerance brought him to see himself as a “chronicler”: a writer who might portray political situations and characters but would not deliberately lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. Privileging the tangible over the ideological, Dos Passos’s writing between the two World Wars reveals the enormous human costs of modern warfare and ensuing political upheavals. This wide-ranging and engaging collection of essays explores the work of Dos Passos during a time that challenged writers to find new ways to understand and render the unfolding of history. Taking their foci from a variety of disciplines, including fashion, theater, and travel writing, the contributors extend the scholarship on Dos Passos beyond his best-known U.S.A. trilogy. Including scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the volume takes on such topics as how writers should position their labor in relation to that of blue-collar workers and how Dos Passos’s views of Europe changed from fascination to disillusionment. Examinations of the Modernist’s Adventures of a Young Man, Manhattan Transfer, and “The Republic of Honest Men” increase our understanding of the work of a complicated figure in American literature, set against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technology, growing religious skepticism, and political turmoil in the wake of World War I.




U.S.A.


Book Description




Life Narratives, Creativity, and the Social in the Americas


Book Description

Resorting to life narratives as a comprehensive umbrella term and embracing hemispheric American studies paradigms, this edited volume explores the interrelations between life narratives, the social world, creativity, and different forms of media to narrate and (re)present the self to see in which way these expressions offer (new) means of (self-) representation within cultural productions from the Americas. Creativity in the context of life narratives nourishes the act of narrating and propels among others the desire to link individual life stories with larger stories of social embeddedness, conditioning, and transformation thus pushing new forms of historiography and other forms of nonfictional writing. Accordingly, the creative impulse fuses individual and collective experience with a larger understanding of the social including the latter’s local and global embeddedness. The contributions in this volume analyze the ways in which the dynamics, tensions, and reciprocities between narrative, creativity, and the social world unfold in life narratives from the Americas. In particular, this volume addresses scholars and students of life writing, cultural and literary studies, gender, disability and postcolonial studies with new insights into life narratives from the Americas.




John Dos Passos and Cinema


Book Description

The first study of his little-known screen writing, John Dos Passos and Motion Pictures: Writing Film, Film Writing uses unpublished manuscripts and correspondence to explore how he adapted film aesthetics to structure his modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s, then, beginning in the 1940s, attempted to revise those novels directly into screenplays reflecting the controversial conservative political shift that redefined his later literary career.




The Book of Otto and Liam


Book Description

Liam is the boy, lying in the hospital, in grave condition, a bullet lodged in his head. Otto is his father, a commercial artist whose marriage has collapsed in the wake of the disaster. Paul Griner’s brave novel taps directly into the vein of a uniquely American tragedy: the school shooting. We know these grotesque and sorrowful events too well. Thankfully, the characters in this drama are finely drawn human beings—those who gain our empathy, those who commit the unspeakable acts, and those conspiracy fanatics who launch a concerted campaign to convince the world that the shooting was a hoax. The Book of Otto and Liam is a suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat read and, at the same time, it is a meditation on the forms evil can take, from the irredeemable act of the shooter himself, to the anger and devastation it causes in the victims’ families. Griner has managed to make an amazing, incredibly powerful book, one that is like no other.




Delphi Collected Works of John Dos Passos (Illustrated)


Book Description

One of the major novelists of the post-World War I lost generation, John Dos Passos established a reputation as a social historian and radical critic of American life. His experimental novels are written in non-linear form, blending elements of biography, song lyrics and news reports to portray a vibrant tapestry landscape of early twentieth-century American culture. This eBook presents Dos Passos’ collected works (the most complete possible in the US), with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Dos Passos’ life and works * Concise introductions to the major texts * All 8 novels in the US public domain, with individual contents tables * Rare novels appearing for the first time in digital publishing, including the unfinished novel ‘Century’s Ebb’ * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * The play ‘The Garbage Man’ and Dos Passos’ poetry — available in no other collection * Includes a wide selection of Dos Passos’ non-fiction * Features the seminal autobiography ‘The Best Times’ – discover the author’s literary life * Ordering of texts into chronological order and genres Please note: due to US copyright restrictions, seven novels (including the U.S.A. trilogy) cannot appear in this edition. When new texts become available, they will be added to the eBook as a free update. CONTENTS: The Novels One Man’s Initiation — 1917 (1920) Three Soldiers (1921) Streets of Night (1923) Manhattan Transfer (1925) Chosen Country (1951) The Great Days (1958) Midcentury (1961) Century’s Ebb (1975) The Play The Garbage Man (1926) The Poetry Poems from ‘Eight Harvard Poets’ (1917) A Pushcart at the Curb (1922) The Non-Fiction Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) Facing the Chair (1927) Orient Express (1927) The Men Who Made the Nation (1957) Mr. Wilson’s War (1962) Brazil on the Move (1963) The Portugal Story (1969) Easter Island (1970) The Autobiography The Best Times (1966)




Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos


Book Description

A new appraisal of Dos Passos's work and life, Toward a Modernist Style describes both the central currents in his early work, and his full participation in literary modernism, culminating in his U.S.A. trilogy, as well as the relationship of these currents to those of an especially vibrant period in American expression. Donald Pizer charts the evolution of Dos Passos's artistic sensibility from its largely conventional expression at the start of the 1920s to the radical formal experimentation of U.S.A. at its close. He places this development in Dos Passos's writing in the context of contemporary ideas about art and society. Pizer also looks at the important roles that Dos Passos's expatriation and his relationship with Ernest Hemingway played in his work as well as his efforts as a painter and their relationship to his literary art. Toward a Modernist Style is both an incisive guide to a major American modernist as well as an exploration of the wider currents that created literary modernism in the early twentieth century.