Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T06:00:51.619Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A “Leg Show Dance” in a Skyscraper: The Sequenced Mechanics of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Alix Beeston
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Performing a historicized analysis of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), this essay returns this understudied author to the center stage of modernist studies and includes the popular stage in accounts of the technologized mechanisms of modernist writing. By disclosing a deep correlation between the composite narrative tactics of Dos Passos's multilinear novel and the mass entertainments of this period, particularly Florenz Ziegfeld's annual Follies revues, it supplies new parameters for theorizing strategies of narration and characterization in modernist fiction vis-à-vis the technologies of popular entertainment and display in the early twentieth century. The discussion of Dos Passos's broad critique of the gendered specular economy of the modern metropolis in the era of Taylorism repositions his early writing as integral to the development of high modernism in the 1920s.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 636 - 651
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Beach, Joseph Warren. “Manhattan Transfer: Collectivism and Abstract Composition.” Dos Passos, the Critic and the Writer's Intentions. Ed. Belkind, Allen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. 54–69. Print.Google Scholar
Brewster, Ben. “Periodization of Early Cinema.” American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Ed. Keil, Charlie and Stamp, Shelley. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 66–75. Print.Google Scholar
Casey, Janet Galligani. Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Charney, Leo. Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald. New York: Zone, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. “Black Checkered Notebook.” Dos Passos, Notebooks.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. “Brown Cover Notebook.” Dos Passos, Notebooks.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. “Ellen Thatcher—Chap. I / Protochapter I.” John Dos Passos Papers, ser. 2: Writings, box 58, binder 2. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Lib., U of Virginia, Charlottesville. MS.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. “A Farewell to Arms.” Rev. of A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose 122.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. Introduction. Three Soldiers. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose 147–48.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. “Is the ‘Realistic’ Theatre Obsolete?” Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose 75–78.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. The Major Nonfictional Prose. Ed. Pizer, Donald. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. Notebooks, 1919-27. John Dos Passos Papers, ser. 3: Personal, box 126: Diaries and Notebooks, sleeves 11 and 12. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Lib., U of Virginia, Charlottesville. MS.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. U.S.A.: The Forty-Second Parallel, Nineteen-Nineteen, The Big Money. London: Lehmann, 1950. Print.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. “The Writer as Technician.” Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose 169–72.Google Scholar
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Fahy, Thomas. Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, Gretchen. “John Dos Passos' Use of Film Technique in Manhattan Transfer and The Forty-Second Parallel.” Literature/Film Quarterly 14.3 (1986): 189–94. Communication and Mass Media Complete. Web. 27 Sept. 2012.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Geyh, Paula E. “From Cities of Things to Cities of Signs: Urban Spaces and Urban Subjects in Sister Carrie and Manhattan Transfer.” Twentieth Century Literature 52.4 (2006): 413–42. JSTOR. Web. 27 Sept. 2012.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde.” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63–70. Print.Google Scholar
Harding, Desmond. Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other.” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 44–64. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Cinema and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Jonsson, Stefan. Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.Google Scholar
Keller, Susan. “Compact Resistance: Public Powdering and Flânerie in the Modern City.” Women's Studies 40 (2011): 299–335. Taylor and Francis Online. Web. 18 Aug. 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komar, Kathleen L. Pattern and Chaos: Multilinear Novels by Dos Passos, Doblin, Faulkner, and Koeppen. Columbia: Camden, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Kracauer, Siegfried. “Girls and Crisis.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Ed. Kaes, Anton, Jay, Martin, and Dimendberg, Edward. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 565–66. Print.Google Scholar
Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Mass Ornament.” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. and trans. Levin, Thomas Y. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 75–88. Print.Google Scholar
Lewis, Sinclair. “Manhattan at Last!” Rev. of Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos. Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Maine, Barry. London: Routledge, 1988. 67–72. Print.Google Scholar
Lowry, E. D. “The Lively Art of Manhattan Transfer.” PMLA 84.6 (1969): 1628–38. JSTOR. Web. 27 Sept. 2012.Google Scholar
Magny, Claude-Edmonde. The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two Wars. Trans. Hochman, Eleanor. New York: Ungar, 1972. Print.Google Scholar
Manhatta: A Film by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. Getty Museum, 2 Feb. 2012. YouTube. Web. 4 Mar. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuuZS2phD10>..>Google Scholar
McCarren, Felicia. Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Mickalites, Carey James. “Manhattan Transfer, Spectacular Time, and the Outmoded.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 67.4 (2011): 59–82. Project MUSE. Web. 28 Nov. 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mizejewski, Linda. Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Mlle. Anna Held Arrives: Naïve Talk of the Parisian Beauty and $l,500-a-Week Singer.” New York Times. New York Times, 16 Sept. 1896. Web. 11 Feb. 2013.Google Scholar
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 14–30. Print.Google Scholar
Nanney, Lisa. John Dos Passos. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Petrovic, Paul. “‘To Get to the Center’: Recovering the Marginalized Woman in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer.” Studies in American Naturalism 4.2 (2009): 152–72. Project MUSE. Web. 28 Nov. 2012.Google Scholar
Rogers, Gayle. “Restaging the Disaster: Dos Passos and National Literatures after the Spanish-American War.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.2 (2013): 61–79. Project MUSE. Web. 18 Aug. 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowe, John Carlos. Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique. Hanover: Dartmouth Coll. P, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Seed, David. Cinematic Fictions. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Shloss, Carol. In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840-1940. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Singer, Ben. “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Charney, Leo and Schwartz, Vanessa R. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 72–96. Print.Google Scholar
Spindler, Michael. “John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts.” Journal of American Studies 15.3 (1981): 391–405. Cambridge Journals. Web. 27 Sept. 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suárez, Juan A. “City Space, Technology, Popular Culture: The Modernism of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta.” Journal of American Studies 36.1 (2002): 85–106. Cambridge Journals. Web. 27 Sept. 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Trumpeter, Kevin. “Furnishing Modernist Fiction: The Aesthetics of Refuse.” Modernism/Modernity 20.2 (2013): 307–26. Project MUSE. Web. 10 Oct. 2012.Google Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Dover, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Wilson, Edmund. The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Print.Google Scholar