초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Since the novels of John Dos Passos synthesize, in a dialectical way, the spirit of American radicalism with the aesthetical techniques and styles of modernism, they belong to radical modernism. One of the characteristics of radical modernism lies in its function of dialectical totalization, so that it is inevitable to rethink the anachronistic concept dialectical totality in order to understand the revolutionary nature of Dos Passos' novels which are designed for portraying the modern phases of American capitalism. The dialectic and its related concept, totality, are not closed and totalitarian schemes of which some postmodernists unfairly accuse it. Rather, in conjunction with totality, the dialectic becomes a dynamic and moving principle by which Dos Passos' novels attempt to portray heterogeneous and fluid aspects of capitalist society as a whole. Because of their aesthetical purpose of portraying the historical aspects of American capitalism from dialectical totality, his novels have the features and impulses of the traditional epic that G. Lukács has previously elucidated. In this sense, the earlier novels of John Dos Passos, such as Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, can be defined as the modernist epics designed to overcome the fragmented and reified environments of capitalist society in modern America by presenting them as a whole from the perspective of dialectical totality.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
John Dos Passos, capitalism, dialectics, totality, epic, American literature, modernism, Hegel, Lukács
