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Infrastructure
Kate Marshall, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
January 17, 2008

Modern communication is often understood as an abstractly informational process, one in which messages circulate wirelessly or via print and broadcast media. However, the physical infrastructure organizing architectural and urban sociality tends to make itself surprisingly visible as communications technology in early twentieth- century American fiction. This chapter deploys an expansive notion of communication, inclusive of its physical and medial infrastructure, in order to examine how novels by Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, and Henry Roth provide an account of their own communication processes and mediality. As ventilation, circulation, and transit systems in these novels clog abruptly or become exhaustively connective, they index a cold everydayness to working communication.