SOURCE: Rapf, Joanna E. “Volatile Forms: The Transgressive Energy of Ragtime as a Novel and Film.” Literature-Film Quarterly 26, no. 1 (January 1998): 16-22.

In the following essay, Rapf explores the dynamics of the novel Ragtime and examines the elements that were lost and retained in its film adaptation.

Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

—E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

E. L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime, is certainly about “making witness.” Its serpentine structure, drifting from one subject and one point-of-view to another, with its allusive narrator who seems by the end to be a little boy reflecting on the past of his youth, is about the creation and re-creation...