In and Out of Sight
Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen
Published on 23. February 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
280 pages
978-0-19-767301-0 (ISBN)
Description
In a post-digital media landscape tracked endlessly by streams and feeds of images, it is clearer than ever that photography is an art poised between arresting singularity and ambiguous plurality. Drawing on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a provocative new account of the relationship between photography and modernist literature--a literature which has long been considered to trace, in its formal experimentation, the influence of modern visual technologies.
Making pioneering claims about the importance of photography to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alix Beeston traverses the history of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the composite experiments of Francis Galton to the epic portrait project of August Sander; from the surrealist self-fashioning of Claude Cahun to the reappropriation of lynching photographs by black activist groups; from the collectable postcards of Broadway stars to the glamour shots of Hollywood celebrities-these and other serialized photographic projects provide essential contexts for understanding the fragmentary, composite forms of literary modernism.
In a series of richly detailed literary analyses, Beeston argues that the gaps and intervals of the composite literary text model the visual syntax of photography--as well as its silences, absences, and equivocations. In them, the social and political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. Moving in and out of these textual openings, In and Out of Sight pursues the fleeting, visible and invisible figure of the woman-in-series, who recasts absence and silence as forms of presence and witness. This shadowy figure emerges as central to the conceptual space of modernist literature--a terrain not only gendered but radically constructed around the instability of female bodies and their desires.
Making pioneering claims about the importance of photography to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alix Beeston traverses the history of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the composite experiments of Francis Galton to the epic portrait project of August Sander; from the surrealist self-fashioning of Claude Cahun to the reappropriation of lynching photographs by black activist groups; from the collectable postcards of Broadway stars to the glamour shots of Hollywood celebrities-these and other serialized photographic projects provide essential contexts for understanding the fragmentary, composite forms of literary modernism.
In a series of richly detailed literary analyses, Beeston argues that the gaps and intervals of the composite literary text model the visual syntax of photography--as well as its silences, absences, and equivocations. In them, the social and political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. Moving in and out of these textual openings, In and Out of Sight pursues the fleeting, visible and invisible figure of the woman-in-series, who recasts absence and silence as forms of presence and witness. This shadowy figure emerges as central to the conceptual space of modernist literature--a terrain not only gendered but radically constructed around the instability of female bodies and their desires.
Reviews / Votes
Beestons methodology has all the hallmarks and pleasures of the current trend in literary studies that blends theoretical subtlety-ably moving between the various branches of media and visual studies, as well as feminist theory and theories of modernity-with archival detail. ... This is an exciting debut, one which discloses through its study of the past consequential insights about how we intercept and areintercepted by mediated forms in our present. * Feminist Modernist Studies * Beeston's probing, artful, and original In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen extends and redirects [the] dialogue between modernist literature and visual media. ... In and Out of Sight is a genuinely interdisciplinary project; its author is as conversant in moving-image studies as she is in modernist literary studies. Beeston sustains her range of references through what she identifies as a sort of critical montage, a methodology that poses important questions for the future of modernist studies. ... Beeston encodes her 'strong' combination of theoretical, formalist, and archival rigor within an open-composite, fractured, sutured-reading practice. It is this openness...that is sure to make it durable for generations of future scholars. * Stephen Pasqualina, Modernism/modernity * In and Out of Sight is powered by a truly interdisciplinary gathering of proofs and examples taken from photography, literature, history, and theory from the modernist moment and our own. [This book] may be the most thrilling offering of 2018". * Shawna Ross, The Year's Work in English Studies * Alix Beeston's bold and challenging new book offers a corrective to [Gertrude] Stein's statement of filmic equivalence, asking that we linger instead with the strangeness of photography when trying to account for literary modernism's interest in serial form. a Beeston carefully establishes a body of criticism into which her own book might be situated and forges an exciting direction for future work in modernist studies, photography and literature, still-moving studies, and feminist studies. * Louise Hornby , University of California, Los Angeles , Modern Language Review * Beeston's impressive first book makes significant contributions not just to the reading of literary and visual modernism but to the understanding of gender, race, and class in twentieth-century American culture... The theoretical and critical analyses of In and Out of Sight reveal how the tensions of the photographic unseen and the still-moving field exist in the representations of gender, race, and class that American visual or verbal images and texts subordinate. * Joseph R. Millichap , MFS Modern Fiction StudiesA * Alix Beeston's In and Out of Sight is one of several exciting and innovative accounts of the relation between literature and photography to appear in recent years, studies that have charted a new course for the field away from a focus on questions of realism and indexicality... the readings that emerge are powerful and persuasive... [it] is a welcome contribution to modernist and visual studies, persuasive evidence that these intertwined fields remain as vibrant as ever. * Stuart Burrows, American Literary History *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
399 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-767301-0 (9780197673010)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
12/2017
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€18.49
Available for download
E-Book
12/2017
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€18.49
Available for download
Person
Alix Beeston is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Cardiff University, Wales.
Content
Introduction: Things Normally Unseen
Chapter 1: Bodies Bad and Gentle: The Surrealist Convulsions of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives
Chapter 2: Black Flesh is White Ash: Reframing Jean Toomer's Cane
Chapter 3: Frozen in the Glassy, Bluestreaked Air: John Dos Passos's Photographic Metropolis
Chapter 4: Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing: The Hollywood Writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Coda: Shared Hallucinations
Works Cited
Chapter 1: Bodies Bad and Gentle: The Surrealist Convulsions of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives
Chapter 2: Black Flesh is White Ash: Reframing Jean Toomer's Cane
Chapter 3: Frozen in the Glassy, Bluestreaked Air: John Dos Passos's Photographic Metropolis
Chapter 4: Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing: The Hollywood Writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Coda: Shared Hallucinations
Works Cited