This essay investigates how capitalism affects the characters in John Dos Passos’ novel Manhattan Transfer. It argues how capitalism in many instances leads to alienation in various ways. In order to understand the historical context of the novel and to perform this character study, the concepts of modernism, modernity, Marxism, capitalism and alienation are put forward in the theoretical framework as the foundation of the essay. The main theories used are Georg Lukács’ definition of heaviness, Ferdinand Tönnies’ discussion on community and society and Melvin Seeman’s presentation of the ways in which the term alienation has been used and explained over the years.

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The “Unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land looms large over the landscape of critical inquiry into the metropolitan character of Anglo-American modernism. Characterized by the disorienting speed and chaos of modern life, the shock of harsh new environments and bewildering technologies, and the isolating and alienating effects of the inhuman urban mob, the city emerges here, so the story goes, as a site of extreme social disintegration and devastating psychic trauma; as a site that generates a textuality of overwhelming dynamism, phantasmagoric distortion, and subjective retreat. This dissertation complicates such conventional understandings of the city in modernism, proposing in place of the “Unreal City” a habitable one—an urban space and literature marked by the salutary everyday practices of city dwellers, the familiar environs of the metropolitan neighborhood, and the variety of literary modes that register such productive and adaptive dwelling processes. Taking seriously Rita Felski’s consideration of the “multiple worlds” of modernity, and thus diverging from the canonical formulations of modern urban experience put forth by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, my work explores the richly ambivalent and ambiguous modernist response to the spatial complexities of the metropolis, drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol in the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life to attend to the quotidian valences that signal a healthful engagement with the city. I uncover this metropoetics of habitability in the vexed response to the city’s network of interconnected spaces in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land; in the attention to the viable dwelling practices of individual urbanites—in contrast to city itself as dominant and dominating character—in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer; in the routine daily operations on display in James Joyce’s Ulysses—breakfast, for instance, or running an errand; in the ordinary series of moments that constitute the work of everyday life in the familiar cityscape of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; and finally in the broad-ranging depictions of urban life in Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank and Other Stories and Quartet.

Les œuvres de John Dos Passos [1896-1970] sont souvent étudiées à l'aune - ou à l'ombre - de son parcours politique. L'enjeu de cette thèse est de revenir sur ce lien entre fiction et politique, en partant non plus des positions politiques de l'auteur mais des œuvres elles-mêmes, pour analyser si et en quoi la fiction peut se faire politique. Des romans de jeunesse aux œuvres de la maturité [notamment Manhattan Transfer et la trilogie U.S.A.], Dos Passos construit sa critique politique, fondée sur la remise en cause du récit linéaire. Il remplace la " destinée manifeste " de l'Amérique par le portrait des " deux nations " qui la composent, et travaille le genre du roman pour le défaire de sa dimension providentielle. En mettant à l'épreuve l'intrigue, le protagoniste et la temporalité, il inscrit cette critique politique au cœur même de l'écriture, et invite à porter un nouveau regard sur les œuvres politiques de l'entre-deux-guerres, et sur les liens entre modernisme et radicalisme, dénoués par la critique de la Guerre Froide. Ses œuvres mettent en scène la difficulté de construire une littérature protestataire dans un pays fondé sur des idéaux démocratiques. Plutôt qu'un perpétuel retour au mythe des origines, cependant, elles mettent en place un véritable dialogue avec les textes fondateurs, dialogue au sein duquel la fiction fait peu à peu émerger, entre les lignes, le non-dit du politique

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ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.