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- Title
The Authentic and Artificial Histories of Mechanical Reproduction in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime.
- Authors
Johnson, Allan
- Abstract
This article reads the motifs of repetition and reincarnation in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime alongside the text's appraisal of mechanical reproduction in the years of the Second Industrial Revolution, the so-called Gilded Age of American wealth and collective buoyancy. As this article argues, Doctorow provocatively combines authentic and artificial histories of three icons of mechanical reproduction as a means to test his narrator's understanding of self as much as of history. In overlaying authentic and artificial histories of mechanical reproduction, the novel evaluates what might potentially fill the void in emptied-out mechanical art, and defines the iterability of humans as an unsustainable industrial and aesthetic fantasy.
- Subjects
RAGTIME (Book); DOCTOROW, E. L., 1931-2015; GILDED Age, 1877-1900; MEC art (Art movement); PLAYER piano
- Publication
Orbis Litterarum, 2015, Vol 70, Issue 2, p89
- ISSN
0105-7510
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/oli.12060