Chapter 1 - Ears Taut to Hear

Summary

Perhaps no writer was more attuned to the shape-shifting nature of sound recording technology than John Dos Passos, whose fascination with modern mass media inflected his early writing and shaped the form of his multimodal novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1934, 1936). By the mid-1920s, the phonograph was no longer new and was, in fact, threatened with obsolescence by the emergence of the radio. And yet, at the same moment that radio began to encroach on the consumer market for phonographs, rapid changes were taking place in sound reproduction -- including the introduction of the condenser microphone and electrical recording -- that were reshaping the ways people would hear recorded sound. As I show, Dos Passos’s innovation was to make use of readers’ ears as highly tuned instruments for listening. But now these novels require a recuperative act of resonant reading to resurface the sonic logic of Dos Passos’s noisy prose.