[aartikel]3732280063:right[/aartikel]From a Man without a Country to an American by Choice: John Dos Passos and Migration
von Miguel Oliveira
Gebundende Ausgabe: 492 Seiten
Verlag: BoD
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-13: 9783732280063
ISBN-10: 3732280063
Preis: 145,00 EUR
Kindle Edition: B00H27523O
Kurzbeschreibung:
In his new book Miguel Oliveira significantly expands the body of Dos Passos scholarship by exploring migration as a recurrent issue in the writer’s heritage, life, politics, and work. Just as the innovative integration of narrative genres characterizes Dos Passos’s fiction, this book effectively employs methodologies of different disciplines—biography, history, sociology, literary criticism—to trace the evolution of Dos Passos’s concern with the personal, international, and literary implications of immigration. In multiple ways Oliveira details how the writer’s ‘opinions on migration rested on his life experience and personal observation, which made their way into his writing.’ Ultimately, Oliveira sheds new light on the major shift in Dos Passos’s politics in 1937-38, arguing that this political evolution transformed and complicated the writer’s political stances on immigration issues and his fictional representations of immigrants’ experiences. Part I of the
book uses previously unexplored archival materials to offer a much more complete history of Dos Passos’s Madeiran ancestors and his own relationship with Madeira than has previously been available in major biographies. Placing that history into the context of theories and global dynamics of migration, Oliveira situates Dos Passos’s evolving attitudes toward immigration and emigrants particularly in U.S. history. Among the book’s copious illustrations appear previously unseen U.S. government files documenting covert investigations by the F.B.I. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service into the writer’s defense of politically controversial immigrants—even, ironically, while he supported McCarthy’s interrogations of suspected Communists. In Part II of the book, Oliveira surveys and analyzes the depiction of numerous forms of immigration in Dos Passos’s fiction and non-fiction. The literary criticism of the early works explores their pessimistic representation of the experience of immigrants drawn to the U.S. by its “utopian myth.” But in works completed after the events of 1938, Oliveira demonstrates, Dos Passos’s depiction of the possibilities inherent in immigration is more affirmative and nuanced, as he began to identify himself as ‘an American by choice.’ Oliveira’s informative work opens new perspectives on the centrality of immigration as a key to this peripatetic writer, his complex family background, his immersion in politics and love of travel, his own lifelong migrations, and his restless search for ways to construct his ‘chronicles’ of the common lives and pivotal events of the twentieth century.—Lisa Nanney, University of North Carolina-Asheville
Klappentext:
Miguel Oliveira has written an impressive work that should be referred to by anyone interested in the not inconsiderable matter of John Dos Passos’ fascination with his Portuguese heritage. More, this is an up-to-date handbook that will be extremely useful for anyone studying the life and writing of this important American author.—Townsend Ludington, Boshamer Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Editor of The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos and author of John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey
Miguel Oliveira combines an international viewpoint with meticulous research to deliver the most comprehensive portrait yet rendered of John Dos Passos as an individual. We witness the subject’s struggle to become an American—one of generations of immigrants painfully molded into one national body. Thanks to Oliveira, more will understand how his family’s immigration experience informed Dos Passos’s masterworks.—Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos Coggin.
