Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - Zoltán Simon: The Image of Technology in Selected American Novels of the 1920's

had become an inseparable part of modern American existence, lifestyle, and psyche. The other reason why the literature of the 1920s is especially useful for studying patterns of changes in American technological consciousness is more practical. The 1920s is regarded by general consensus as a golden age of American letters, a sort of second American Renaissance, second only perhaps to the 1850s. The mere output and quality of the literature produced in this short period would warrant special attention, but more important is the fact that the writers of the Twenties, as will be shown below, appear to have been especially attentive to the changes brought about by technological progress in the period. As much as literature can be accepted as a singular way of documentation and reflection of social, economic, and psychological changes in a given place and period, a number of novels written in the 1920s clearly attest to the above claims about the significance of the decade in any serious consideration of the interaction of technology and American literature. A very comprehensive analysis of this theme in the considerably large corpus of literature of the 1920s would not be possible in the confines of a relatively short paper as this. What follows, then, is a quick survey of the treatments of this interaction in three novels of three selected, now canonical, novelists from the period. The decision to limit the scope of this paper to novels is just as necessarily arbitrary as the selection of the texts

—Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922), John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925)—discussed below. While these novels do not necessarily represent the full scope, and especially not the extremes, of literary responses to technological civilization in the 1920s, in their range of treatments of machine culture they do serve the task of illustrating the image of technology in the literature of the 1920s. II. In the chapter called "Courting the Technological Sublime: Babbitt's Dance" in his analysis of Babbitt

, Glen A. Love situates Sinclair Lewis's novel in the tradition of American writers "struggling] with the contradictory meanings of a new machine 49