Newsreels, Novels, and Cybernetics: Reading the Random Patterns of John Dos Passos's U.S.A.

The novels of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930/1932/1936) are part of a cultural dialogue about the status of communication and information-processing in the early twentieth century. This dialogue includes cybernetics theories, which align information with both pattern and randomness. In Dos Passos's trilogy, recognizable and predictable patterns jostle with random chance as key catalysts for change and progress in American culture. The novels' "Newsreel" sections (like the technology for which they are named) epitomize the perplexing, interconnected logic of cybernetic information, in which pattern meets randomness and fiction bleeds into history.