Network Narration in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy

Wesley Beal examines John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36) to read its complex form what the author once referred to as a "four-way conveyor system" - as an intricate networking scheme, and considers it as an archive of early network thinking. Contrary to traditional readings of U.S.A. that discuss its formal properties in terms of dispersal and the supposedly ruinous disconnections of modern life, the paper argues that the interplay of these formal fragments results in a semiotic web that drives Dos Passos's narrative strategy toward a totalizing vision of the nation and, indeed, history. Beal's paper deals with the progressive widening of network figuration in American modernism to think the very politics of national space, and in focusing on the machinic dynamics of Dos Passos's form, the article establishes network discourses as the organizing principle of several pre-digitization modes of production, including Fordism and the modern corporation.