Chapter 7 details the American novelist John Dos Passos’s interactions with the Soviet authors as a guide, writer of letters of introduction, and literary model. At the time of their visit, Dos Passos was at the center of an important literary debate on the recently articulated socialist realism. By the time they returned, Soviet cultural authorities had turned decisively against Dos Passos’s so-called formalism. Excised from the 1937 Russian edition of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, Dos Passos nonetheless profoundly influenced their account. The Dos Passos connection allows us to understand the genre-defying Odnoetazhnaia Amerika as not only a travelogue, a satire, and picaresque but also as a valedictory intervention in the debate on the possibility of socialist realism with a modernist sensibility.

In the early 1910s, the extension of copyright protection to moving picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, and this phenomenon had a profound effect on film production and the writing of fiction. Paramount Studios, originally the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the most powerful studio of the 1910s and 1920s, in part, due to its unparalleled ability to exploit preexisting literary and dramatic properties: to produce “Famous Plays with Famous Players.” At the same time, this new regime altered the constitution of the American literary field. Authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for eventual adaptation. I call the capacity for authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works before writing the “transmedial possibility” of fiction. This possibility influenced the work of several writers who published in American modernism's great year 1925, all of whom responded in some way to Paramount: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

Chapter 2 reads John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy in the context of cybernetics theorists Norbert Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s contradictory definitions of information (Wiener’s theories align the concept with pattern, while Shannon instead describes it as a measure of randomness). Love argues that Dos Passos’s trilogy integrates both sides of this opposition in ways that are important to our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of early twentieth-century cybernetic thinking. Focusing on the novels’ “Newsreel” sections, she illustrates how this technology – in both form and content, as well as broader industry practices – epitomizes the logic of cybernetic information. By incorporating a literary version of this media form into his novels, Dos Passos demonstrates how predictable patterns jostle with random chance as catalysts for change and progress in the United States. This interdisciplinary pairing shows (a) how cybernetics theories can help us understand the ideological work that texts like Dos Passos’s novels and newsreel productions undertake, and (b) how modernist literature encouraged readers to develop strategies for cybernetic thinking.

This chapter explores the literary 1890s as a stage where new character types were established and exploratory formations of narrative emerged. Before the radical turn into modernism, work was already being done to deconstruct nineteenth-century forms of fictional realism, to inflect its shapes and patterns. The work of Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather sowed seeds that bore fruit over the next decades. Thus, Chopin was fascinated by the human margin, by varieties of behavior that suggested new configurations of sensuality and transgression. Stephen Crane proffered a purgation of nineteenth-century prose, developing a stripped-down realism that connected “the real” to a documentary discourse. In Cather’s early writing a fascination with female performance was allied to an interest in European movements such as Aestheticism and Symbolism. Linking both subjects, her focus on a sensory writing pointed forward to a modernist fascination with embodiment.

Perhaps no writer was more attuned to the shape-shifting nature of sound recording technology than John Dos Passos, whose fascination with modern mass media inflected his early writing and shaped the form of his multimodal novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1934, 1936). By the mid-1920s, the phonograph was no longer new and was, in fact, threatened with obsolescence by the emergence of the radio. And yet, at the same moment that radio began to encroach on the consumer market for phonographs, rapid changes were taking place in sound reproduction -- including the introduction of the condenser microphone and electrical recording -- that were reshaping the ways people would hear recorded sound. As I show, Dos Passos’s innovation was to make use of readers’ ears as highly tuned instruments for listening. But now these novels require a recuperative act of resonant reading to resurface the sonic logic of Dos Passos’s noisy prose.

This essay traces the Cold War Military Industrial Complex (MIC) back to the period of American neutrality in WWI, when US armaments manufacturers grew exponentially through sales to the Allied Powers. Already during this period, the sizeable peace movement argued that US defense and foreign policy was beholden to armament corporations, and later critiqued the corporate profiteering and weak regulation in the procurement system the US developed to industrially mobilize for war. This essay examines two leftist texts making such arguments—Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1919), and John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936). Sinclair’s novel used a munitions-worker protagonist to examine the development of “total war,” which fragmented global labor solidarity by militarizing all industrial capacity; but its Bildungsroman form struggled to capture the expansiveness of the MIC. In contrast, Dos Passos leveraged modernist form to better chart the MIC’s interwar development, especially in the aircraft industry. The Big Money examines the MIC’s propensity to agentless violence and its hostility to workers’ movements, but also treats it as a potential space for class mobility and the bootstrap narrative—a hospitability echoed in the biography of Eddie Rickenbacker, the US’s most famous WWI flying ace and an aviation corporate titan.

While wartime literature and popular culture frequently casts US soldiers as icons of fitness, few return from combat physically or mentally unscathed. This essay explores the cultural history of American warfare through the lens of disability studies (DS). Framed as a series of test cases, this essay shows how American culture (novels, poetry, film) both highlights and masks the experiences of disabled combatants, during wartime and after. Writers, filmmakers, and others have used tropes of disability to criticize American society and foreign policy. This essay highlights related topics, from the use of disability in wartime propaganda to the ways American culture fosters a hierarchical understanding of disability – celebrating some types of injury (e.g., physical wounds) while denigrating others (e.g., mental injuries). A DS approach allows us to see war in a new way – less as a singular event and more as a series of interwoven processes that affect combatants long after ceasefire.

The chapter argues that John Dos Passos in his novel Manhattan Transferappropriates cinematic immediacy effects and documentary aesthetics for the sake of literary innovation and cultural intervention. His formal innovations—the narrative’s montage structure, shifting focalization, and sampling of mass media item—allow the novel to convey the complexity of modern city life while opening up a critical perspective on mass media discourse and urban consumer culture. The chief strategy Dos Passos uses to critically refract popular mass culture is the creation and subsequent dissolution of immediacy effects that encourage the readers to grapple self-reflexively with the text, their reading strategies, and the represented social realities. The novel’s documentary style creates an urban world that seems recorded rather than imagined. Yet the novel continually disrupts this impression of immediacy: its disjunctive structure and surprising narrative shifts confront the readers with their interpretive routines and push them to develop new ways of reading that enable them to cope with both the novel’s experimental form and the depicted cultural practices.