Midwest in the story “Indian Camp”, for example, or how life in Manhattan in the 1920s might be affected by the colonial struggle over Morocco included in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Yet the modernist assumption relied on careful readers, who would take the time to ponder what related such disparate events as the Greco-Turkish War, the subject of Hemingway’s “On the Quai at Smyrna”, and EuroAmerican and Native American relations in the U.S. What connects the global and the local is not clearly established, which is the task of the novelist. People don’t read newspapers carefully, Dos Passos argued implicitly in Manhattan Transfer, whose pages jumble together international and local news. Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Joyce imagined that by changing the form in which journalistic prose appeared, the message might be more effective. It is by now a commonplace that high modernism competed with journalism by incorporating its media (both text and image) in order to re-function the message.Īlthough I want to call attention to this modernist heritage in my own brief “news story” from the Second Gulf War, I also want to suggest a somewhat different role for the scholar in writing contemporary journalism as part of a progressive cultural politics. William Bird may have been thinking of the newspaper headlines in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, even though the latter novel wasn’t published until 1925. What follows then is inspired by Hemingway’s interludes in In Our Time, as well as by his original idea that a collection of quasi-journalistic short pieces might be rendered as avant-garde prose-poems with the intention of shocking his readers into some sort of recognition of the horrors awaiting those living through the interwar years. edition, the vignettes were understood to suggest an oblique commentary, a sort of modernist palimpsest (perhaps recalling Pound’s influence on the young Hemingway), relating the volatile politics to the apparent normality of everyday life in the U.S. When combined with the Nick Adams’ and other stories of the Midwest in the U.S. When hand setting the type for the Paris edition, Bird considered framing “each page with a border of newsprint, carefully selected to serve both as decoration and illustration…fitting for a book by a young journalist”. These prose vignettes had been published separately the year before in Paris as a modernist experiment in prose poetry, in our time (1924), by William Bird in his Three Mountains Press. edition of In Our Time (1925), Ernest Hemingway included among the well-known stories brief vignettes or “interludes”, many dealing with World War I and the unstable political situation in Europe before and during the war.
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