Steve was born in San Francisco, California, in nineteen fiftyfive; San Francisco that for a while was home to the Gold Rush and the population boomed during the Great Depression the banks never crashed and San Francisco built the Oakland Bay Golden Gate bridges. During the fifties San Francisco’s Treaty ended war with Japan and […]
Easy Riding through Dos Passos’ Novel
Before even starting my trek through Dos Passos’ tour de force, I was faced with the lack of understanding as to what the story was about. I tried using my google skills to bring something up, but nowhere, not Wikipedia nor Sparknotes had anything more than the title itself. It struck me, while reading the […]
Randomness and Patterns.
THE BOOK I’m not exactly sure how I feel about The 42nd Parallel. While I do think it is very engaging and daring to an extent, I also feel like it tries too hard (or maybe it’s just over my head). As we’ve talked about in class, the randomness of his different sections, in particular […]
Gender and Opportunity: The Average Joe vs The Indomitable Jane
Contrary to previous posts, I’m going to take a step away from the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections and focus more on what Don Passos is trying to convey through his fiction, specifically as it appears through the lens of gender. In the second Janey section, from pages 119 to 131, the reader is given […]
Newsreel Newsflash: No.
In John Dos Passos’ novel The 42nd Parallel, readers are forcefully confronted with fragmented narratives tracing the lives of numerous American characters. By intermingling sections of other types of texts, Passos weaves a pastiche of differing perspectives into a single book. He incorporates small snippets of autobiography called the “Camera Lens”, other smaller biographies of […]
“But Dos Passos does not stop there” How 42nd Parallel Lives on Today
The Literary Canon refers to a body of books, narratives, and other texts considered to be the most influential or important of a particular period of time in history. Often reflecting the American experience of the era, certain works in literature would either solidify their place in the ever-changing Literary Canon or they would […]
Capturing the Real and Fake News
I, like most of us on the blog it seems, have been particularly interested in the Camera Eye and Newsreel sections of the novel. I want to look closely at these sections in particular between pages 203 and 209. Throughout the novel, these sections have conveyed a unique tone and composition distinct from the rest […]
The American Nightmare: When The Dream Turns Sour
As the other two posts about The 42nd Parallel have so far focused on either the Newsreel or The Camera Eye sections of the text, I thought I would explore how Dos Passos best makes use of his standard prose chapters to uncover the supposed horrific truths behind what he considers to be the dangerous, often […]
Imitations of the “Newsreel” and “Camera eye”.
As the other blog posts about The 42nd Parallel have hinted at, the format of John Dos Passos’s “Newsreel” and “Camera eye” sections were what really made this book stick out (negatively or positively depending on the person). While at first I found it slightly hard to follow, the more I read it the more […]
U.S.A.
In the Prologue of the novel, The 42nd Parallel, we get two pages of paragraph-long sentences, mixed with random punctuation, and no clear sense of a narrator/speaker. I would like to pay particular attention to the last paragraph in the prologue which reads: “U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. […] U.S.A is … a public-library full of […]