Networks of modernism: reorganizing American narrative

Abstract

Networks of Modernism offers a new understanding of American modernist aesthetics and introduces idea that networks were central to how American moderns thought about their culture in their dramatically changing milieu. While conventional wisdom holds that network rose to prominence in 1980s and 1990s in context of information technologies, digitization is only most recent manifestation of networks in intellectual history. Crucial developments in modern America provide another archive of network discourses well before advent of digital age. The rise of railroad recast American landscape as an assortment of interconnected hubs. The advent of broadcast radio created a decentralized audience that was at once medium's strength and its weakness. The steady and intertwined advances of urbanization and immigration demanded reconceptualization of community and ethnic identity to replace failing melting pot metaphor for nation. Indeed, signal developments of modern era eroded social stratification and reorganized American society in a nodal, decentralized, and interpenetrating form--what today we would label a distributed network that is fully flattened and holds no clustered centers of power. In this ferment of social upheaval and technological change, moderns found what we would today term the network, though they did not have vocabulary for it that we do now, to be a versatile model for their aesthetic experiments in representing social space and social relations. Whether they used figuration of network as a kind of formal experiment to negotiate tensions between dispersal and unity, fragment and totality, or took network as a subject in itself, as seen when dealing with crowds or public spaces, network was a way for writers and artists to conceptualize and explore their rapidly changing society. Through readings of works of Randolph Bourne, Jean Toomer, Anita Loos, John Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, Networks of Modernism positions network as defining figure of American modernist aesthetics and explores its use as a conceptual tool used to think through rapid changes in American society.