In And Out Of Sight Modernist Writing And The Photographic Unseen Alix Beeston by Alix Beeston 9780190690168, 019069016X instant download after payment.

Drawing on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still & moving images, In & Out of Sight provides a provocative new account of the relationship between photography & 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 & 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 & 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 & intervals of the composite literary text model the visual syntax of photography--as well as its silences, absences, & equivocations. In them, the social & political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. Moving in & out of these textual openings, In & Out of Sight pursues the fleeting, visible & invisible figure of the woman-in-series, who recasts absence & silence as forms of presence & 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 & t