Book Review: John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years.
The University of Tennessee Press, $65 John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years (ed. Aaron Shaheen and Rosa Maria Bautista-Cordero) spotlights John Dos Passos’s (1896-1970) interwar writing career in consideration to his self-reputed role as a contemporary ‘chronicler’. This volume of essays is split into four parts: ‘Chronicling War and its Aftermath’, ‘Chronicling American Commercial Culture: Manhattan Transfer’, ‘Chronicling Political Ambivalence in the Age of Totalitarianism’, and ‘Chronicling the America-Europe Divide’. Notably, the essay collection succeeds in maintaining Dos Passos’s relevance not only as an eminent modernist whose montage/camera-lens narrative techniques are disparate to that of other modernists, but also as a figure struggling to remedy the division between fiction and non-fiction. Woven with Dos Passos’s wavering political leanings and residencies in Europe, John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling nestles itself in the long-line of criticism surrounding the author. Its relevance lies in how his corpus is […]