Description
Book SynopsisCamera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses. For the avant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in its most concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurous writers they constituted an element of modern experience that could hardly be ignored.Camera Works thus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlantic avant-garde, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the avant-garde is traced from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the
Trade Review"Photography, Michael North argues in this exciting and profoundly original study, has for too long been understood as just another medium, with its particular possibilities and conventions--a medium, moreover, that provides for 'realistic' representation. But understood properly in its mode and function, photography emerges as itself a kind of modern writing, its inherent mediation itself determining how we view the world in words. In a series of provocative and groundbreaking chapters, ranging from Stieglitz's Camera Works and the Readies of Bob Brown to the novels of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, North shows that recorded mediation, in its aesthetic, social, and cultural effects, is at the very core of the literature we call Modernist."--Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
"Camera Works offers vivid new takes on literary Modernism, showing how the evolving technologies of photography and film exerted a profound and often problematic influence on the writings of the period. North's readings of even the most familiar modernist texts offer a range of excitingly unfamiliar perspectives."--Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Mechanical Recording and the Modern Arts ; Part One: The Logocinema of the Little Magazines ; Chapter 1 Camera Work: The Hieroglyphics of the New Photography ; Chapter 2 transition: The Movies, the Readies, and the Revolution of the Word ; Chapter 3 Close Up: International Modernisms Struggle with Sound ; Part Two: Spectatorship, Media Relations, and Modern American Fiction ; Chapter 4 F. Scott Fitzgeralds Spectroscopic Fiction ; Chapter 5 An Eyeminded People: Spectatorship in Dos Passos U.S.A. ; Chapter 6 Du Bois, Johnson, and the Recordings of Race ; Chapter 7 Ernest Hemingways Media Relations ; Conclusion
