Radio blues: Literature, mass communication and the human voice in Depression America (Kenneth Burke, John Dos Passos, Henry Roth)

This dissertation argues that American literature responded to the consolidation of the mass media in the 1930s by figuring a new relationship between communication and power. Through an analysis of criticism and fiction by Kenneth Burke, John Dos Passos, Henry Roth and other major figures of the decade, the dissertation shows how a series of reconceptions of language, communication, and their relation to the subject lead to a notion that power operates in a profoundly "fictional" way---that is, it is produced, exercised and resisted in narrative communication, which is always governed by language's conventions, rhetorical figures and forms. The dissertation begins by arguing Burke's anti-modernist, sociological view of literature and his theory of narrative as "a strategy for encompassing a situation" help us sidestep the traditional opposition between literature and mass culture that still dominates many renditions of the 1930s. An analysis of Burke's criticism and of his single novel enable shows how American literature of this decade locked its horns not with mass culture but with mass communication. Through a close reading of novels by Dos Passos, Roth and others the dissertation then demonstrates how in the 1930s the conceptions of language and communication are transfigured. Language is transformed from a catalog of labels generated by inner experience to an independent structuring agent whose effects are often unconscious. Communication is then transformed from the conveyance of a priori meanings to the process of identity formation, for subjects and culture generally. These reconceptions subsequently cast power as formatted by communication and communication as the key requirement for historical agency. They also recast how subjects and texts exercise that agency---not through intersubjective dialogue or linguistic invention, but through strategies that acknowledge the fictional character of identity and operation of power: the "seizing" of inherited symbols of authority, propaganda, bricolage, and hermeneutics. The dissertation closes by emphasizing how the human voice---now mediated by radio, sound pictures, and records---comes to be re-imagined in this decade as at once no longer the sign of presence and authenticity and the sign of uncanny power.