The Roar of Modernity: Metropolitan Sound-Scapes and the Making of the Modern Subject in John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer

Abstract

This article explores the specificities and psychological effects of urban noise in John Dos Passos’ novel Manhattan Transfer. It seeks to elucidate how Manhattan’s soundscape is represented on the novel’s formal and content level and how it assumes an agency in its own right, when ceaselessly enveloping the novel’s characters. The city’s specific acoustic regimes, therefore, prove much more instrumental in constituting the characters as modern subjects than other sensorial dimensions. Within a thus enacted metropolitan panacousticon, the urban subject is crucially defined not only as a noise source in itself, but as always already overheard by a supposed other.