Modernist Fiction and News

Modernist Fiction and News characterizes uses novel reading of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf to explore how these authors engaged with a rapidly expanding news industry in order to establish an experimental space in which to represent experience with the hope of greater immediacy and faithfulness to reality.

"Rando not only makes striking interventions in the emerging field of Modernist periodical studies, but also usefully contributes to the ongoing critical conversation about Modernism's relation to commercial culture." - James Joyce Literary Supplement

"This timely and beautifully written book shows that the sinuous difficulties of Joyce, Stein, Woolf, and Dos Passos first emerged as responses to the technological possibility of total information storage and thus continue to offer powerful critiques of our own media-saturated culture. Dexterously moving between richly articulated close readings and often striking theoretical claims, Modernist Fiction and News is a provocative study ofhow modernism seeks to carve out a unique immediacy of experience from the mere happenings of a news-driven modernity." - Sean Latham, Walter Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, and former President of the Modernist Studies Association

"Modernist Fiction and News: the very title, with its accommodating and complicit 'and,' is asking for a fight. For a generation of critics trained to see fiction and journalism as (high and low) brawlers, Rando unfolds a very different story of the complicit, even 'co-dependent,' relationship between the fourth estate and the Republic of Letters. It makes for a fascinating, compelling study." - Kevin J. H. Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor and Chair of English, Pomona College

"Ultimately, this book provides a small Benjaminian shock of warning:it does not do to be glib about the shortcomings of hard-nosed commercial news media. Its strength, however, is when it ignores this larger context and concentrates on the playful, erudite reworkings of ordinary life that make up so much of modernist literature." - Journal of Modern Periodical Studies

DAVID RANDO is an Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University, USA.