Abstracts of Papers

John Carlos Rowe:
Interpellation, Urbanization, and Globalization in John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925)

Our contemporary focus on globalization often relies on new understandings of cities as metropolitan centers for new forms of colonial, class, gender, racial and sexual definition and surveillance. Ann Douglas has argued recently in Mongrel Manhattan that we are still coping with new definitions of these important social categories established in the period of modernism. Using John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) as an example, I want to consider how modernism imagined the relationship among the interpellation of modern subjects, the public sphere in modern New York at this time. My goal will be to assess the differences and similarities between modernist and postmodernist conceptions of "urban diversity and cultural difference" in the case of New York city.