摘要：This essay argues that the urban collective novel serves as an important modernist precursor to network narratives. The collective novel is a literary form, particularly popular during the 1930s, that explores a wide context through a decentered narrative. Previous discussions of these novels have focused on them as exemplars of modernist form in proletarian literature. However, this essay shows another origin for the form in concerns about the metropolis and mass culture that complicates our understanding. Drawing on examples from novels by John Dos Passos, Daniel Fuchs, Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst, William S. Rollins, Jr., and Josephine Herbst it shows how these texts offered not only radically ambivalent assessments of networked existence but often a pessimistic view of the possibilities of political community, extending at times to specific critiques of communist politics. In its conclusion, the essay draws links between these novels and the cinematic network narratives that became popular in the first decade of the 21st century.
Loading...
