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href="/dhq/index/title.html"> Title</a></li><li><a href="/dhq/index/author.html"> Author</a></li></ul></div><img src="/dhq/common/images/lbarrev.png" style="margin-left : 7px;" alt=""/><div id="leftsideID"><b>ISSN 1938-4122</b><br/></div><div class="leftsidecontent"><h3>Announcements</h3><ul><li><a href="/dhq/news/news.html#peer_reviews">Call for Reviewers</a></li><li><a href="/dhq/submissions/index.html#logistics">Call for Submissions</a></li></ul></div><div class="leftsidecontent"><script type="text/javascript">addthis_pub = 'dhq';</script><a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')" onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()"><img src="http://s9.addthis.com/button1-addthis.gif" width="125" height="16" alt="button1-addthis.gif"/></a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js"></script></div></div><div id="mainContent"><div id="printSiteTitle">DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly</div><div id="toc"> <h1>2011 5.2</h1> <h2>Theorizing Connectivity</h2> <div class="cluster"><h3>Editors: Stacy Lavin and Wesley Beal</h3></div> <div class="cluster"><h3>Front Matter</h3> <div class="articleInfo" style="margin:0 0 1em 0;"><span class="monospace">[en] </span><a href="/dhq/vol/5/2/000097/000097.html">Theorizing Connectivity: Modernism and the Network Narrative</a><div style="padding-left:1em; margin:0;text-indent:-1em;">Wesley Beal, Lyon College; Stacy Lavin, Independent Scholar</div><span class="viewAbstract">Abstract <span class="viewAbstract monospace" style="display:inline" id="abstractExpanderabstract000097en"><a title="View Abstract" class="expandCollapse monospace" href="javascript:expandAbstract('abstract000097en')">[en]</a></span><span style="display:none" class="abstract" id="abstract000097en"> Introduction to the “Theorizing Connectivity” cluster. </span></span><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Theorizing%20Connectivity%3A%20Modernism%20and%20the%20Network%20Narrative&rft.jtitle=Digital%20Humanities%20Quarterly&rft.stitle=DHQ&rft.issn=1938-4122&rft.date=2011-05-17&rft.volume=005&rft.issue=2&rft.aulast=Beal&rft.aufirst=Wesley&rft.au=Wesley%20Beal&rft.au=Stacy%20Lavin"> </span></div> </div> <div class="cluster"><h3>Articles</h3> <div class="articleInfo" style="margin:0 0 1em 0;"><span class="monospace">[en] </span><a href="/dhq/vol/5/2/000094/000094.html">Network Narration in John Dos Passos’s <cite class="italic">U.S.A.</cite> Trilogy</a><div style="padding-left:1em; margin:0;text-indent:-1em;">Wesley Beal, Lyon College</div><span class="viewAbstract">Abstract <span class="viewAbstract monospace" style="display:inline" id="abstractExpanderabstract000094en"><a title="View Abstract" class="expandCollapse monospace" href="javascript:expandAbstract('abstract000094en')">[en]</a></span><span style="display:none" class="abstract" id="abstract000094en"> Wesley Beal examines John Dos Passos’s <cite class="italic">U.S.A.</cite> trilogy (1930-36) to read its complex form — what the author once referred to as a “four-way conveyor system” — as an intricate networking scheme, and considers it as an archive of early network thinking. Contrary to traditional readings of <cite class="italic">U.S.A.</cite> that discuss its formal properties in terms of dispersal and the supposedly ruinous disconnections of modern life, the paper argues that the interplay of these formal fragments results in a semiotic web that drives Dos Passos’s narrative strategy toward a totalizing vision of the nation and, indeed, history. Beal’s paper deals with the progressive widening of network figuration in American modernism to think the very politics of national space, and in focusing on the machinic dynamics of Dos Passos’s form, the article establishes network discourses as the organizing principle of several pre-digitization modes of production, including Fordism and the modern corporation. </span></span><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Network%20Narration%20in%20John%20Dos%20Passos%E2%80%99s%20U.S.A.%20Trilogy&rft.jtitle=Digital%20Humanities%20Quarterly&rft.stitle=DHQ&rft.issn=1938-4122&rft.date=2011-05-17&rft.volume=005&rft.issue=2&rft.aulast=Beal&rft.aufirst=Wesley&rft.au=Wesley%20Beal"> </span></div> <div class="articleInfo" style="margin:0 0 1em 0;"><span class="monospace">[en] </span><a href="/dhq/vol/5/2/000092/000092.html">Missed Connections: The Collective Novel and the Metropolis</a><div style="padding-left:1em; margin:0;text-indent:-1em;">J.J. Butts, Assistant Professor of English, Wartburg College</div><span class="viewAbstract">Abstract <span class="viewAbstract monospace" style="display:inline" id="abstractExpanderabstract000092en"><a title="View Abstract" class="expandCollapse monospace" href="javascript:expandAbstract('abstract000092en')">[en]</a></span><span style="display:none" class="abstract" id="abstract000092en"> This essay argues that the urban collective novel serves as an important modernist precursor to network narratives. The collective novel is a literary form, particularly popular during the 1930s, that explores a wide context through a decentered narrative. Previous discussions of these novels have focused on them as exemplars of modernist form in proletarian literature. However, this essay shows another origin for the form in concerns about the metropolis and mass culture that complicates our understanding. Drawing on examples from novels by John Dos Passos, Daniel Fuchs, Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst, William S. Rollins, Jr., and Edwin Seaver it shows how these texts offered not only radically ambivalent assessments of networked existence but often a pessimistic view of the possibilities of political community, extending at times to specific critiques of communist politics. In its conclusion, the essay draws links between these novels and the cinematic network narratives that became popular in the first decade of the 21st century. </span></span><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Missed%20Connections%3A%20The%20Collective%20Novel%20and%20the%20Metropolis&rft.jtitle=Digital%20Humanities%20Quarterly&rft.stitle=DHQ&rft.issn=1938-4122&rft.date=2011-05-17&rft.volume=005&rft.issue=2&rft.aulast=Butts&rft.aufirst=J.J.&rft.au=J.J.%20Butts"> </span></div> <div class="articleInfo" style="margin:0 0 1em 0;"><span class="monospace">[en] </span><a href="/dhq/vol/5/2/000093/000093.html">Winesburg, Ohio: A Modernist Kluge</a><div style="padding-left:1em; margin:0;text-indent:-1em;">Molly Gage, University of Minnesota</div><span class="viewAbstract">Abstract <span class="viewAbstract monospace" style="display:inline" id="abstractExpanderabstract000093en"><a title="View Abstract" class="expandCollapse monospace" href="javascript:expandAbstract('abstract000093en')">[en]</a></span><span style="display:none" class="abstract" id="abstract000093en"> This article argues that Sherwood Anderson’s <cite class="italic">Winesburg, Ohio</cite>, while it cannot be considered a text straightforwardly concerned with technology, offers a modernist version of the story cycle that anticipates the delocalized and highly structured interconnections facilitated by the network. Unlike today’s seamlessly embedded networks, however, the prototypical form depicted in <cite class="italic">Winesburg, Ohio</cite> functions as a kluge, “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole” . Anderson’s kluge augurs network technology and therefore suggests that the form loomed large in modernists’ mind. However, <cite class="italic">Winesburg, Ohio</cite> illustrates the network’s propensity to foster users’ inner alienation while enabling their unprecedented connection and thereby warns against the antagonistic quality of the network’s rhizomatic structure. </span></span><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Winesburg,%20Ohio%3A%20A%20Modernist%20Kluge&rft.jtitle=Digital%20Humanities%20Quarterly&rft.stitle=DHQ&rft.issn=1938-4122&rft.date=2011-05-17&rft.volume=005&rft.issue=2&rft.aulast=Gage&rft.aufirst=Molly&rft.au=Molly%20Gage"> </span></div> <div class="articleInfo" style="margin:0 0 1em 0;"><span class="monospace">[en] </span><a href="/dhq/vol/5/2/000096/000096.html"> “The Globe is All One”: <cite class="italic">Wars I Have Seen</cite> as Proto-Network Narrative</a><div style="padding-left:1em; margin:0;text-indent:-1em;">Stacy Lavin, Independent Scholar</div><span class="viewAbstract">Abstract <span class="viewAbstract monospace" style="display:inline" id="abstractExpanderabstract000096en"><a title="View Abstract" class="expandCollapse monospace" href="javascript:expandAbstract('abstract000096en')">[en]</a></span><span style="display:none" class="abstract" id="abstract000096en"> “The Globe is All One: Wars I Have Seen as Proto-Network Narrative” charts Gertrude Stein's characterization of the human mind as an data-processor by tracing the conceptual correspondences between her writings and early information theory, including the work of Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, and Vannevar Bush. The article argues that Stein first sees language as data that human beings are compelled to parse in even the most contextless and semantically “noisy” frameworks, which shapes the purpose and form of Stein's notoriously difficult prose poem, “Tender Buttons”; the ease with which meaning can be exchanged emphasizes the importance of the ways in which a given meaning is selected from a set of possible meanings rather than interpreted or revealed. While this may simply reiterate the mode of “Tender Buttons” in different terms, the paper's crucial intervention is in its positioning of the chance selection of significance as the mode of signification that animates her wartime memoir “Wars I Have Seen”. Like words in the poem, political identity in occupied France is unstable and waits to be parsed in the act of encounters with others and with history. In her narrative's foregrounding of and experimental play with the conventions of memoir, Stein discovers the shifting nature of her main character (herself) in a series of ruminations and chance meetings; an early version of the network narrative emerges in the nodal structure of the story that undermines chronological and nationalist frames of signification. </span></span><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=The%20Globe%20is%20All%20One%3A%20Wars%20I%20Have%20Seen%20as%20Proto-Network%20Narrative&rft.jtitle=Digital%20Humanities%20Quarterly&rft.stitle=DHQ&rft.issn=1938-4122&rft.date=2011-06-21&rft.volume=005&rft.issue=2&rft.aulast=Lavin&rft.aufirst=Stacy&rft.au=Stacy%20Lavin"> </span></div> </div> <h2><a href="/dhq/vol/5/2/bios.html">Author Biographies</a></h2></div><div id="footer"><div style="float:left; max-width:70%;"> URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/2/index.html<br/> Comments: <a href="mailto:dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org" class="footer">dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org</a><br/> Published by: <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org" class="footer">The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations</a> and <a href="http://www.ach.org" class="footer">The Association for Computers and the Humanities</a><br/>Affiliated with: <a href="https://academic.oup.com/dsh">Digital Scholarship in the Humanities</a><br/> DHQ has been made possible in part by the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>.<br/>Copyright © 2005 - <script type="text/javascript"> var currentDate = new Date(); document.write(currentDate.getFullYear());</script><br/><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nd/4.0/80x15.png"/></a><br/>Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>. 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