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The Eye's Mind : Literary Modernism and Visual Culture / Karen Jacobs.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]Copyright date: ©2000Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9781501725814
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 809/.9112 21
LOC classification:
  • PN56.M54 J33 2001
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Modernism and the Body as Afterimage -- PART I: THE EYE IN THE TEXT -- 2. The Eye's Mind: Self-Detection in James's The Sacred Fount and Nabokov's The Eye -- 3. Two Mirrors Facing: Freud, Blanchot, and the Logic of Invisibility -- PART II: THE BODY VISIBLE IN THE LENS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE -- 4. From "Spyglass" to "Horizon": Tracking the Anthropological Gaze in Zora Neale Hurston -- 5. One-Eyed Jacks and Three-Eyed Monsters: Visualizing Embodiment in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man -- PART III: AUDIENCE AND SPECTACLE -- 6. Spectacles of Violence, Stages of Art: Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf's Dialectic -- 7. Modernist Seductions: Materializing Mass Culture in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust -- Postscript: From "Our Glass Lake" to "Hourglass Lake": Photo/graphic Memory in Nabokov's Lolita -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with photography and film as well as the methods of observation used by the social sciences, Karen Jacobs identifies distinctly modernist kinds of observers and visual relationships.This important reconception of modernism draws upon American, British, and French literary and extra-literary materials from the period 1900-1955. These texts share a sense of crisis about vision's capacity for violence and its inability to deliver reliable knowledge. Jacobs looks closely at the ways in which historical understandings of race and gender inflected visual relations in the modernist novel. She shows how modernist writers, increasingly aware of the body behind the neutral lens of the observer, used diverse strategies to displace embodiment onto those "others" historically perceived as cultural bodies in order to reimagine for themselves or their characters a "purified" gaze.The Eye's Mind addresses works by such high modernists as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and (more distantly) Ralph Ellison and Maurice Blanchot, as well as those by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West which have been tentatively placed in the modernist canon although they forgo the full-blown experimental techniques often seen as synonymous with literary modernism. Jacobs reframes fundamental debates about modernist aesthetic practices by demonstrating how much those practices are indebted to the changing visual cultures of the twentieth century.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781501725814

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Modernism and the Body as Afterimage -- PART I: THE EYE IN THE TEXT -- 2. The Eye's Mind: Self-Detection in James's The Sacred Fount and Nabokov's The Eye -- 3. Two Mirrors Facing: Freud, Blanchot, and the Logic of Invisibility -- PART II: THE BODY VISIBLE IN THE LENS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE -- 4. From "Spyglass" to "Horizon": Tracking the Anthropological Gaze in Zora Neale Hurston -- 5. One-Eyed Jacks and Three-Eyed Monsters: Visualizing Embodiment in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man -- PART III: AUDIENCE AND SPECTACLE -- 6. Spectacles of Violence, Stages of Art: Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf's Dialectic -- 7. Modernist Seductions: Materializing Mass Culture in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust -- Postscript: From "Our Glass Lake" to "Hourglass Lake": Photo/graphic Memory in Nabokov's Lolita -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with photography and film as well as the methods of observation used by the social sciences, Karen Jacobs identifies distinctly modernist kinds of observers and visual relationships.This important reconception of modernism draws upon American, British, and French literary and extra-literary materials from the period 1900-1955. These texts share a sense of crisis about vision's capacity for violence and its inability to deliver reliable knowledge. Jacobs looks closely at the ways in which historical understandings of race and gender inflected visual relations in the modernist novel. She shows how modernist writers, increasingly aware of the body behind the neutral lens of the observer, used diverse strategies to displace embodiment onto those "others" historically perceived as cultural bodies in order to reimagine for themselves or their characters a "purified" gaze.The Eye's Mind addresses works by such high modernists as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and (more distantly) Ralph Ellison and Maurice Blanchot, as well as those by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West which have been tentatively placed in the modernist canon although they forgo the full-blown experimental techniques often seen as synonymous with literary modernism. Jacobs reframes fundamental debates about modernist aesthetic practices by demonstrating how much those practices are indebted to the changing visual cultures of the twentieth century.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Apr 2024)