The Authentic and Artificial Histories of Mechanical Reproduction in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime

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.