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Journal ArticleDOI

A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review)

01 Jan 2013-Modern Fiction Studies (The Johns Hopkins University Press)-Vol. 59, Iss: 4, pp 866-868
TL;DR: Lurie as discussed by the authors reviewed A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939-1945 by Stuart Burrows (review). Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 4 (2013): 866-68.
Abstract: This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact scholarshiprepository@richmond.edu. Recommended Citation Lurie, Peter. \"A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review).\" Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 4 (2013): 866-68. doi:10.1353/mfs.2013.0058. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the history of the antebellum/postbellum divide and considers archives of ninteenth-century literature, including the long careers of several major writers, the motley genealogies of literary realism, and the florescence of late nineteenth-century poetry.
Abstract: In both material and conceptual ways—from survey courses and anthologies to scholarly projects and narratives of literary history—the year 1865 dominates American literary studies. This essay examines the history of the antebellum/postbellum divide and considers archives of ninteenth-century literature this divide tends to misrepresent, including the long careers of several major writers, the motley genealogies of literary realism, and the florescence of late nineteenth-century poetry. We seek not to dimish the importance of the Civil War—indeed, the war looms large in the rethinking we advocate—but rather to trouble the before-after narratives of literary and cultural history the 1865 divide fosters. The Civil War and emancipation, we contend, are less important as endpoints than as nexuses of transition and extension in nineteenth-century literary history. Reconsidering them as such represents a new dimension of the ongoing project of rescaling American literary studies.

23 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For all the many thousands of pages that have been devoted to the American Civil War, the hosts of its dead remain essentially unknown to us as mentioned in this paper, and thus the figure of the unknown soldier can be identified.
Abstract: For all the many thousands of pages that have been devoted to the American Civil War, the hosts of its dead remain essentially unknown to us. Who were they, these men (and women) whose names have floated away on the breeze? What did their experience of death—the very end of knowable experience—mean for them and their contemporaries, and how did it acquire those meanings? Why do the Civil War dead, as the dead, generate such interest today? It is the vexing difficulty of these questions that has both motivated this essay and suggested its basic hermeneutic: I take the routine namelessness of the Civil War dead as an opportunity and a method for understanding how their mortality took on particular forms of significance during the war itself and in the decades after. As in a shallow grave, the historical predicate here is close under the surface: the unprecedented numbers of dead made it difficult to account for, identify, or adequately inter the body of every fallen soldier, not to mention those of slaves or other noncombatants whose lives the war had claimed—and thus appeared the figure of the unknown soldier. Multiply that figure by thousands and we arrive at the collective Civil War dead, a phrase that only points up their anonymity. Of course, it was not the soldiers themselves who were nameless, but their mediated presence in image, text, and memory—in songs, histories, photos, memorials, paintings, and oral lore. This was an anonymity imposed from without, by circumstances and culture, by the inability or even unwillingness of the living to attach a particular name to a particular body. As used here, then, the terms namelessness and anonymity refer to an epistemological condition created by a subtle and probably unintentional form of social exclusion, a condition in which the dead body is preserved for circulation and

20 citations

01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore transatlantic modernist literature's methods of representing the material female mind and body in light of photographic and cinematic composition and analysis, and 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.
Abstract: 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

12 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Charles Lewis1
TL;DR: A photograph appears in the opening scene of William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), when during his interview with Bartley Hubbard, who is writing a feature profile of the wealthy paint manufacturer, Lapham shows the journalist a “large warped, unframed” portrait of his family: “There we are, all of us”.
Abstract: A photograph appears in the opening scene of William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), when during his interview with Bartley Hubbard, who is writing a feature profile of the wealthy paint manufacturer, Lapham shows the journalist a “large warped, unframed” portrait of his family: “There we are, all of us” (7–8). Although the photograph is “warped, unframed,” and “dusty,” Lapham insists that the photographic evidence is up to the task of verifying visually what he has just been describing with words. Moreover, while a Lapham family portrait in the 1870′s would have been captured with a large, cumbersome camera using inconvenient wet plates, Howells’s first readers already would have been increasingly familiar with a rather different medium, given the rapid changes of photographic technology, convenience, and cost unfolding during this period. In the same year of the novel’s publication, for example, George Eastman (who had by then already developed both dry plate and paper film technologies) invented the transparent film that by 1888 made possible the Kodak camera, which was cheap, portable, and capable of taking 100 pictures, rendering photography available for virtually everybody. As did Howells himself throughout his career, realist writers and their readers ever since have variously linked photography and literary realism, as reflected in Howells’s own reference to Eastman’s “snap-camera” invention in a November 1888 “Editor’s Study” column inHarper’s Magazine (964). However, our attention in this novel is extensively directed to the other visual medium of painting, although this first scene literally grabs hold of a photograph to tell its painted story. Readers ever since have largely overlooked the photograph in Lapham’s opening hand. A relationship between painting and photography in the novel is prefigured in this first photograph not only in that Silas uses the portrait to talk about paint, but also because the photographic image actually depicts a painted surface: “The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham’s own paint” (8). The scene is variously painted, photographed, and verbally described. Put differently, the photograph is the medium by which Howells

6 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Awkward Age (1899) and "Crapy Cornelia" (1909) as discussed by the authors were the first works to depict photographs as modes of virtual flirtation and deixical signification.
Abstract: Like many authors of the long nineteenth-century period, Henry James was both fascinated and troubled by photography’s capacity to extend social relations across distance and time. As this article will show, in The Awkward Age (1899) and ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909) he represents photography as enabling new forms of virtual flirtation. The Awkward Age projects its protagonist, an adolescent girl named Nanda, into a network of photographic exchange. This leads to serious problems when her mother seeks to win Nanda a suitor. The text not only depicts photographs as modes of flirtation; it also shares with photography a concern for deixical signification. The book presents the identity of its individual characters through a blank writing style that is both flirtatious and photographic in its pleasurable deferral of meaning. By the time he wrote ‘Crapy Cornelia’, James had adjusted to the new instantaneous and portable photography. As a result, this later story portrays obsolete carte-de-visite photography in nostalgic terms: as a form that enabled affective (and effective) networks of connection, even between the living and the dead.

2 citations

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the history of the antebellum/postbellum divide and considers archives of ninteenth-century literature, including the long careers of several major writers, the motley genealogies of literary realism, and the florescence of late nineteenth-century poetry.
Abstract: In both material and conceptual ways—from survey courses and anthologies to scholarly projects and narratives of literary history—the year 1865 dominates American literary studies. This essay examines the history of the antebellum/postbellum divide and considers archives of ninteenth-century literature this divide tends to misrepresent, including the long careers of several major writers, the motley genealogies of literary realism, and the florescence of late nineteenth-century poetry. We seek not to dimish the importance of the Civil War—indeed, the war looms large in the rethinking we advocate—but rather to trouble the before-after narratives of literary and cultural history the 1865 divide fosters. The Civil War and emancipation, we contend, are less important as endpoints than as nexuses of transition and extension in nineteenth-century literary history. Reconsidering them as such represents a new dimension of the ongoing project of rescaling American literary studies.

23 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For all the many thousands of pages that have been devoted to the American Civil War, the hosts of its dead remain essentially unknown to us as mentioned in this paper, and thus the figure of the unknown soldier can be identified.
Abstract: For all the many thousands of pages that have been devoted to the American Civil War, the hosts of its dead remain essentially unknown to us. Who were they, these men (and women) whose names have floated away on the breeze? What did their experience of death—the very end of knowable experience—mean for them and their contemporaries, and how did it acquire those meanings? Why do the Civil War dead, as the dead, generate such interest today? It is the vexing difficulty of these questions that has both motivated this essay and suggested its basic hermeneutic: I take the routine namelessness of the Civil War dead as an opportunity and a method for understanding how their mortality took on particular forms of significance during the war itself and in the decades after. As in a shallow grave, the historical predicate here is close under the surface: the unprecedented numbers of dead made it difficult to account for, identify, or adequately inter the body of every fallen soldier, not to mention those of slaves or other noncombatants whose lives the war had claimed—and thus appeared the figure of the unknown soldier. Multiply that figure by thousands and we arrive at the collective Civil War dead, a phrase that only points up their anonymity. Of course, it was not the soldiers themselves who were nameless, but their mediated presence in image, text, and memory—in songs, histories, photos, memorials, paintings, and oral lore. This was an anonymity imposed from without, by circumstances and culture, by the inability or even unwillingness of the living to attach a particular name to a particular body. As used here, then, the terms namelessness and anonymity refer to an epistemological condition created by a subtle and probably unintentional form of social exclusion, a condition in which the dead body is preserved for circulation and

20 citations

01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore transatlantic modernist literature's methods of representing the material female mind and body in light of photographic and cinematic composition and analysis, and 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.
Abstract: 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

12 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Charles Lewis1
TL;DR: A photograph appears in the opening scene of William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), when during his interview with Bartley Hubbard, who is writing a feature profile of the wealthy paint manufacturer, Lapham shows the journalist a “large warped, unframed” portrait of his family: “There we are, all of us”.
Abstract: A photograph appears in the opening scene of William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), when during his interview with Bartley Hubbard, who is writing a feature profile of the wealthy paint manufacturer, Lapham shows the journalist a “large warped, unframed” portrait of his family: “There we are, all of us” (7–8). Although the photograph is “warped, unframed,” and “dusty,” Lapham insists that the photographic evidence is up to the task of verifying visually what he has just been describing with words. Moreover, while a Lapham family portrait in the 1870′s would have been captured with a large, cumbersome camera using inconvenient wet plates, Howells’s first readers already would have been increasingly familiar with a rather different medium, given the rapid changes of photographic technology, convenience, and cost unfolding during this period. In the same year of the novel’s publication, for example, George Eastman (who had by then already developed both dry plate and paper film technologies) invented the transparent film that by 1888 made possible the Kodak camera, which was cheap, portable, and capable of taking 100 pictures, rendering photography available for virtually everybody. As did Howells himself throughout his career, realist writers and their readers ever since have variously linked photography and literary realism, as reflected in Howells’s own reference to Eastman’s “snap-camera” invention in a November 1888 “Editor’s Study” column inHarper’s Magazine (964). However, our attention in this novel is extensively directed to the other visual medium of painting, although this first scene literally grabs hold of a photograph to tell its painted story. Readers ever since have largely overlooked the photograph in Lapham’s opening hand. A relationship between painting and photography in the novel is prefigured in this first photograph not only in that Silas uses the portrait to talk about paint, but also because the photographic image actually depicts a painted surface: “The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham’s own paint” (8). The scene is variously painted, photographed, and verbally described. Put differently, the photograph is the medium by which Howells

6 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Awkward Age (1899) and "Crapy Cornelia" (1909) as discussed by the authors were the first works to depict photographs as modes of virtual flirtation and deixical signification.
Abstract: Like many authors of the long nineteenth-century period, Henry James was both fascinated and troubled by photography’s capacity to extend social relations across distance and time. As this article will show, in The Awkward Age (1899) and ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909) he represents photography as enabling new forms of virtual flirtation. The Awkward Age projects its protagonist, an adolescent girl named Nanda, into a network of photographic exchange. This leads to serious problems when her mother seeks to win Nanda a suitor. The text not only depicts photographs as modes of flirtation; it also shares with photography a concern for deixical signification. The book presents the identity of its individual characters through a blank writing style that is both flirtatious and photographic in its pleasurable deferral of meaning. By the time he wrote ‘Crapy Cornelia’, James had adjusted to the new instantaneous and portable photography. As a result, this later story portrays obsolete carte-de-visite photography in nostalgic terms: as a form that enabled affective (and effective) networks of connection, even between the living and the dead.

2 citations