Annales de l’université d’Alger
Volume 27, Numéro 2, Pages 46-58
2015-07-15
Cinematic Devices In John Dos Passos’s Usa : A Record Of America’s Social History
Authors : Ait Ammour Houria .
Abstract
The three volumes of USA – The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936) - are a kaleidoscopic portrait of Twentieth Century America, a nation buzzing with history and life. They tell the story of the American people over nearly three decades, starting from the early 1900’s and ending in the late 1920’s. This period was referred to as a period of radical reform. In all fields, Americans were engaged in a quest for new and appropriate ways of apprehending reality. It was also a period during which America was immersing itself deeply in the triumphant capitalist world. The American writer of this period was trusted with the duty of enlightening the reader by exposing malpractices in all fields of this new life through his writings .He was thus compelled to invent new artistic forms to challenge the materialism in which the new America threw itself. Assuredly, the roots of such forms were to be found in Modernism, as the Americans were living in a ‘modern’ era. In this article, we explore Dos Passos’s treatment of modernist techniques in his trilogy USA .We want to demonstrate that the writer does not deal simply with the history of a crisis; he also relates his aesthetic activity to the American historical process through the use of some modernist techniques, such as ‘Newsreels’, ‘Camera Eyes’ and sometimes even ‘juxtapositions’ to recreate the collective mind of the time. These techniques were considered by artists /writers as the main channels for the spread of ideas and information
Keywords
Newsreel, Camera Eye, Juxtaposition, modernist technique, capitalism, materialism, America, Twenties, Dos Passos, USA.
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