John Dos Passos Research Paper
1. John Dos Passos: A Committed Writer
The American way of life is an expression that refers to the "life style" of people living in the United States of America. It is an example of a behavioral modality, developed from the 17th century until today. It refers to a nationalist ethos that purports to adhere to principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It has some connection to the concept of American exceptionalism and the American Dream.
It was the American day dream that especially fascinated John Dos Passos. Like a darkling Walt Whitman, he sang of a sprawling, intricate, in many ways desolate, industrial America. Dos Passos had to invent his own form to contain his vision. U.S.A. was a montage of deft biographies, Joycean …show more content…
Dos Passos was very much aware of this and sharpened his literary techniques by studying art and developing a more-than-passable style that has touches of expressionism, precisionism, and even a bit of cubism about it. He understood color and composition, and these found expression in his writing in heavy doses of imagism in Manhattan Transfer and in the multi-voiced, multiple perspectives that give shape to the city novel and then more obviously to U.S.A. The devices of the Camera Eye, the short biographies of noteworthy people, the Newsreels, and the longer narratives about a variety of representative characters, that is, interspersed as they are, became his method of achieving a cubistic effect to the degree that the written page will …show more content…
From that moment, and very likely long before it, Dos Passes knew of Grosz's bitter caricatures of the bourgeoisie, caricatures directed at the United States after his arrival there. Dos Passos did not exactly draw Grosz's "stick figures" in words, but he did very much satirize in the same bitter vein as had the other artist, and his caricatures have the flat, two dimensional qualities about them that Grosz's have. In a piece that appeared in Esquire magazine in September 1936, a month after the publication of the third volume of the U.S.A. trilogy, Dos Passos wrote about the German's
The American way of life is an expression that refers to the "life style" of people living in the United States of America. It is an example of a behavioral modality, developed from the 17th century until today. It refers to a nationalist ethos that purports to adhere to principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It has some connection to the concept of American exceptionalism and the American Dream.
It was the American day dream that especially fascinated John Dos Passos. Like a darkling Walt Whitman, he sang of a sprawling, intricate, in many ways desolate, industrial America. Dos Passos had to invent his own form to contain his vision. U.S.A. was a montage of deft biographies, Joycean …show more content…
Dos Passos was very much aware of this and sharpened his literary techniques by studying art and developing a more-than-passable style that has touches of expressionism, precisionism, and even a bit of cubism about it. He understood color and composition, and these found expression in his writing in heavy doses of imagism in Manhattan Transfer and in the multi-voiced, multiple perspectives that give shape to the city novel and then more obviously to U.S.A. The devices of the Camera Eye, the short biographies of noteworthy people, the Newsreels, and the longer narratives about a variety of representative characters, that is, interspersed as they are, became his method of achieving a cubistic effect to the degree that the written page will …show more content…
From that moment, and very likely long before it, Dos Passes knew of Grosz's bitter caricatures of the bourgeoisie, caricatures directed at the United States after his arrival there. Dos Passos did not exactly draw Grosz's "stick figures" in words, but he did very much satirize in the same bitter vein as had the other artist, and his caricatures have the flat, two dimensional qualities about them that Grosz's have. In a piece that appeared in Esquire magazine in September 1936, a month after the publication of the third volume of the U.S.A. trilogy, Dos Passos wrote about the German's