At the movies.

The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics

This dissertation explores transatlantic modernist literature’s methods of representing the material female mind and body in light of photographic and cinematic composition and analysis. The ongoing and often concurrent transatlantic development of photographic and cinematic technology invites a broad historical trajectory: from stop-motion photography to cinematography to the transition from silent to sound film. As photography and film manipulate time and space by halting and resuming perpetual motion, so my investigation crosses time and space, freezing provocative moments and posing enlightening encounters. Through interdisciplinary associations, I aim to reframe and reanimate our critical perception of the multiplicitous modernist scene. Each chapter thus views literary works from the primary era of cinematic development, the 1920s and ’30s, through the proverbial lens of visual media works or analyses, such as stop-motion photograph series or feminist film theories. Rather than attributing a literary method to a media technique, or vice versa, I investigate their various intersections and deviations, their various possibilities and limitations. These explorations ultimately discover the potential of modernist narratives to engage the compositional methods and subjects of photography and film in the expression of otherwise unsanctioned, unseen, and unspoken female identity. INDEX WORDS: Modernist novel, Feminist film theory, Narrative voice, Female embodiment, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston COMPOSING WOMEN: INTERSECTIONS OF TRANSATLANTIC MODERNIST LITERATURE AND VISUAL MEDIA

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Composing Women: Intersections of Transatlantic Modernist Literature and Visual Media

This article explores the coloniality of gender, sexuality, and desire, and the links between nationalist and commercial imperatives, in the making of Egypt's first sound film, or talkie, in 1932. Through an analysis of the politics, economy, and memory of Yusuf Wahbi's film Awlad al-Dhawat (Sons of the Aristocrats), it shows how the interplay between new sound technologies, the global film trade, and nationalist and racialized narratives of gender and resistance shaped the contours of ideal femininity and masculinity during the interwar period in Egypt. The article also shows how the film's representations formed at the intersection between the filmmakers’ attempts to challenge colonial stereotyping and their efforts to capture an ever-expanding global film market. Often neglected in cinema scholarship, early filmmaking in Egypt, I argue, is critical to understanding wider processes of nation formation and gendered characterizations.

Sound and desire: race, gender, and insult in egypt's first talkie

Voice is a powerful tool of agency – for humans and non-humans alike. In this article, we go through the long history of talking heads and statues to publicly displayed robots and fortune-tellers, as well as consumer-oriented products such as the late 19thcentury talking dolls of Thomas Edison. We also analyse the attempts at making speaking machines commercially successful on various occasions. In the end, we investigate how speech producing devices such as the actual digital assistants that operate our current technological systems fit into this historical context. Our focus is on the gender aspects of the artificial, posthuman voice. On the basis of our study, we conclude that the female voice and other feminine characteristics as well as the figures of exoticized and racialized ‘Others’ have been applied to draw attention away from the uncanniness and other negative effects of these artificial humans and the machinic speech they produce. Technical problems associated with the commercialization of technologically produced speech have been considerable, but cultural issues have played an equally important role.

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Voices from the uncanny valley: How robots and artificial intelligences talk back to us.

ln Close Up , Dorothy Richardson and H. D. pose sound film as male because they constrain women’s aesthetic engagement as film spectators, a position that anticipates later feminist film criticism on embodied voice in classical cinema. This essay uncovers how Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director of Hollywood sound film from 1928 to 1943, embeds responses to these critiques through what she calls “unusual moments” in her films. In such moments, Arzner explores the possibility of an embodied modernist voice that is at once reflexive about technologies of mass culture and attentive to women’s social and aesthetic concerns.

Sara Bryant

Papers

Dorothy Arzner's Talkies: Gender, Technologies of Voice, and the Modernist Sensorium