Rethinking America: Modernism and the documentary impulse in the works of Dos Passos, Farrell, Herbst, and the Federal Theatre Project

This dissertation focuses on attempts to represent American history in the light of Depression politics. The radical writers of the 1930's who did not reject modernism totally attempted to rethink modernist fictional techniques in the context of their contemporary political experience. In so doing, they produced a literature which has the subtlety and sophistication of modernism without its hermetic qualities. These writers shared a preoccupation with issues of American identity, and worked to represent American history in such a way that readers could imagine themselves as potential historical agents, rather than as passive spectators.; After considering the works in a critical and historical context, I focus on U.S.A. as Dos Passos' advertisement for his own modernist techniques: I view the novel as a debate on the relative strength of different rhetorical strategies, and as an illustration of the need for a new form of radical fictional discourse.; Farrell, in Studs Lonigan, addresses the problem of finding working class readership for the radical novel. In presenting a working class character who is deeply immersed in mass culture, and who is in fact an avid reader, but whose concept of masculinity prevents him from reading "serious" literature, Farrell questions the prevailing trope of the masculinized worker.; Herbst focuses on the ways in which women can use their private, domestic experience to gain political awareness and ultimately to become effective in the public sphere.The characters of Herbst's Trexler trilogy achieve radical consciousness through understanding their familial past in larger historical terms. Ultimately this political awareness leads Herbst's protagonist to become a political journalist.; Finally, I focus on parallel developments in drama through the examination of the Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project. These collectively written documentary dramas, seen in production by twenty-five million people, provided a public forum for the examination of many of the same issues that could be considered only in isolation by readers of the trilogies.; In my conclusion I discuss the reasons for the disappearance, since the thirties, of the American radical novel, and for the divergence of literary and political radicalism in this country.