The Romance of Observing Conflict: John Dos Passos’s Orient Express and American Orientalism

This paper examines how John Dos Passos’s Orient Express: A Travel Memoir (1927) reframes the Mediterranean as a site of modernist tension where history, politics, and identity intersect. Set against the geopolitical instability of the 1920s, Dos Passos’s journey transforms travel into an exploration of postwar consciousness, capturing the Mediterranean as a landscape of ruins and revolutions rather than romance. Through a fragmented, impressionistic style, he attempts to expose the moral ambiguities of observation and the privileges of American mobility while simultaneously participating in them. Engaging with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, Susan Nance’s analysis of American consumerist fantasies, and Douglas Little’s definition of American Orientalism, the paper situates Orient Express within a lineage of U.S. writers who turned eastward to negotiate their nation’s expanding global presence. Dos Passos is ultimately both a participant in and critic of the American gaze, crafting a travelogue that anticipates later disillusionment with empire and modernity. In essence, this is an argument that Dos Passos’s Mediterranean journey functions as a modernist experiment in seeing where the observer’s struggle for authenticity mirrors America’s uneasy encounter with its own power.
Keywords: John Dos Passos, the Mediterranean, American identity, travel writing, narrative choices