Manhattan Transfer: estetica modernista e denuncia sociale

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos’s third novel, goes beyond the reinterpretation of the quintessentially American myth of the self-made man and depicts the newly forming American mass society. The writer outlines a world in which individuals are losing their humanity to become passive servants of an economic and social system that, muddling free will, is turning them from citizens to consumers. This essay shows how Dos Passos, while consolidating his peculiar Modernist poetics, explores the evolution of a society that is transforming all relationships between people and systems of production. Blurring ethics and aesthetics, Manhattan Transfer renders the American urban context of the time through an innovative fragmented form that Dos Passos employs to make his reader see, hear and feel the ongoing change in its making; by so doing, he anticipates the uncanny consequences that still inhabit the new millennium.