Managing materials: Montage and the representation of totality in Depression-era fiction (John Dos Passos).

摘要

This dissertation examines the intersections between aesthetic form and political commitment during the 1930s. Beginning with an argument that one cannot read politics in direct relation to aesthetic form, this project explores the forces and ideologies that led so many critics to do just that. The dissertation looks closely at the rhetoric of hope that surrounded the complex novel, a literary form now almost forgotten. In the 1930s, however, American leftists championed the complex novel—perhaps best exemplified by John Dos Passos' U.S.A.—as a literary mode uniquely capable of representing the forces at work in contemporary capitalism. Neither bildungsroman nor Soviet-style novel of group solidarity, complex novels cinematically “cut” from character to character, and from stream of consciousness to documentary; in doing so, the reader is challenged to discover the underlying forces that bind together the disparate elements.; The dissertation argues that these novels borrow from the techniques of Soviet film montage in order both to fragment narrative and to demand that the reader synthesize these fragments into a meaningful whole. Using Barbara and John Ehrenreich's theorization of the “professional-managerial class” as well as Richard Ohmann's recent elaboration of it, it argues that Depression-era intellectuals' commitment to montage must be seen as an outgrowth of their class's commitment to the ideals of management itself. Particular attention is paid to the work of John Dos Passos to show how his interest in Soviet film montage is related to the economic theories of Thorstein Veblen as well as to the scientific management doctrine propounded by Frederick Winslow Taylor. By analyzing the aesthetics of the left-wing professional-managerial class, this project stresses the dynamic interaction of art, ideology and culture.