Book News: Dos Passos in the interwar years

John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years

BY AARON SHAHEEN AND ROSA MARÍA BAUTISTA-CORDERO

University of Tennessee Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1621907138

https://utpress.org/title/john-dos-passos/

“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.

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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.

"John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling is a wide-ranging and engaging set of essays that extends and enriches the scholarship on Dos Passos. Welcome attention is given to Dos Passos’s travel writing, his work with theater, and the Iberian contexts so crucial for his artistic and political development. The collection also does justice to Dos Passos’s skills as a capacious chronicler of his time with pieces on how a diverse range of culture informed his writing—from clothes to burial practices to the contemporary cinema. A collection that decisively captures the wide sphere of interest of one of the key writers of left global modernism in the 1920s and 1930s."—Mark Whalan, Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English, University of Oregon 

"A trenchant and wide-ranging study of one of America's greatest authors. These essays trace the winding course of Dos Passos's writing and provide timely reflections on the functions of art in interesting times."—Wesley Beal, author of Networks of Modernism

“An essential addition to Dos Passos studies, John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling expands one of the field’s central debates—the impact of the writer’s politics on his representations of history—into the 21st century with new critical perspectives. The multiplicity of voices and approaches in this volume illustrate the range of forms—innovative fiction, political and travel essays, experimental drama, memoir—in which he expressed the turbulent political, economic, and cultural transformations that propelled the US and the world into modernity.” —Lisa Nanney, author of John Dos Passos and Cinema and John Dos Passos Revisited, and co-editor of The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos

AARON SHAHEEN is the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. His books include Androgynous Democracy: Modern American Literature and the Dual-Sexed Body Politic and Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture.

ROSA MARÍA BAUTISTA-CORDERO is a professor of translation and interpretation in the Department of English Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is the author of the most recent Spanish-language annotated translation of Manhattan Transfer.