| The basic argument of “The Modern America Network Narrative” is that American modernism is characterized by a dialectical tension between homogeneity and dispersal, totality and fragmentation, and that these polarities are mediated by the figure of the network. Accordingly, I consider the network the defining figure of modernist aesthetics—and especially modernist narrative.;Chapters on Jean Toomer's Cane, Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust demonstrate the different kinds of networks that are at play in modernism: networks of people, networks of technology and commodities, and, perhaps most importantly, networks of form. This reappraisal of modernism challenges the conventional wisdom that networks are the prevailing social metaphor for contemporary times, only recently having replaced the melting pot as the dominant metaphor for issues of globalization and the digital age, and providing a framework for the network narrative genre that is often associated with contemporary films like Crash, Syriana, and Babel. By arguing that American modernists also used networks to represent their milieu, I argue that these later network discourses actually signal a residual trace of the cultural logic of modernism.;The bulk of the project is to excavate the kinds of networked representation that thrived during modernism and to consider what those lost modes of network thinking indicate about American culture during the modern period. How might modernists use networks to articulate their milieu differently than we use networks today? And how might abandoned modernist conceptions of networks provide an archaeology of possibilities for the network? The central conclusions I have reached from such prompts are twofold. First, I recover the diverse networked aesthetics that typified the modern period but are relatively undeveloped today. Second, I argue that contemporary manifestations of networks are suggestive of a nostalgia for modernism—particularly its vibrant public culture. |
