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.
In addition to being a major twentieth-century author, John Dos Passos painted, principally in watercolor, throughout his career. This book reproduces 68 examples of Dos Passos's art, almost all in full color, presented in two parts containing 13 sections. In Part One, each section is devoted to a similar kind of art work produced within a specific time frame; in Part Two, each section consists of work in a specific genre. The book also includes essays devoted to the history and nature of Dos Passos' work as a pictorial artist and to the relationship of this work to his novels. It concludes with a survey of Dos Passos art collections, exhibitions, and previous published illustrations and paintings. The book as a whole seeks to demonstrate that Dos Passos's lifelong commitment to and practice of pictorial representation are vital aspects of his career because they confirm and manifest in both verbal and visual stylistics such modernist tendencies as Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. Both the essays and illustrations in this book argue for the importance of Dos Passos's paintings as keys to fully understanding the writer's complex body of work and, in their striking compositions and vibrant colors, as challenging objects of visual pleasure in their own right.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Explores how the novels of Henry James reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society, and how essential the language and imagery of the arts, as well as friendships with artists, were to James's writing.
