Description
Book SynopsisOptical Impersonality will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature and visual culture and to those interested in the intersections of art, literature, science, and technology.
Trade ReviewWalter's book certainly and productively opens up a rethinking of optical subjectivity, and offers engaging ways of critiquing the relationship between textual and imagistic form. British Society for Literature and Science Christina Walter makes clear that hers is an account of impersonality whose critical stakes turn on their difference from previous scholarship on the topic. Isis Walter displays her "individual talent," which lies in showing not just how writers like Eliot manipulate impersonality toward their own ends, but also how critics' misinterpretations of these maneuvers have led to an impoverished model of impersonal existence. Journal of Modern Literature
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Eye Don't See: Embodied Vision, Ontology, and Modernist Impersonality
The Visual Vernacular, Imagetextuality, and Modernism'sOptical Unconscious
The Modern Image and Impersonality's Critique of Identity
1. A Protomodern Picture Impersonality: Walter Pater and Michael Field's Vision
Vision, Anders-streben, and Performance in The Renaissance
Pater contra Mérimée: Toward an Imperfect Impersonality
The Visual Field(s): Framing the Politics of Paterian Impersonality
2. Images of Incoherence: The Visual Body of H.D. Impersonaliste
Mixing an Imagist Pigment: Modern Art, Science, and Materiality in Sea Garden
"Sign-posting" Impersonality in Notes on Thought and Vision
Close Up and Impersonal: Subjectivity through the Camera Lens and the Talking Cure
Borderline's Aesthetic of Identity Dis-order
3. Getting Impersonal: Body Politics and Mina Loy's "Anti-Thesis of Self-Expression"
Feminism and Faces: Staving Off the Threat of Impersonal Negation
Optical Experiments and a Poetics "Beyond the Personal"
"Insel in the Air": Weighing the Politics of Impersonality
4. D. H. Lawrence's Impersonal Imperative: Vision, Bodies, and theRecovery of Identity
"Chaos Lit Up by Visions": Poetic Attention and Its Material Limits
From Impersonality to "Creative Identity": A Critical Sleight of Hand
Visual Evolution and Identitarian Futurity in Lady Chatterley's Lover
5. Managing the "Feeling into Which We Cannot Peer": T. S. Eliot'sImpersonal Matters
"New and Wonderful Visions": The Science of Eliot's Impersonality
The Waste and Repair Land: Impersonality, but with Gender
Redeeming the Still "Unread Vision": The Family Reunion's Dramatic Bodies
Afterword: Modernist Futurity: The "Creative Contagion" of Impersonality and Affect
A Shared Visual Vernacular: Affect Theory's Impersonality
Open Ended: Affecting Impersonality, Impersonalizing Affect
Notes
Bibliography
Index
