Optical Impersonality Science, Images, and Literary Modernism / Christina Walter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walter, Christina, 1975-

Series:

Hopkins studies in modernism.

Hopkins Studies in Modernism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.

Optics in literature.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (352 p.)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2014

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"Christina Walter brings the next offering to the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series. Her work looks at the influence of the modern science of visual perception a variety of modernist writers. Walter focuses in particular on the way in which writers like H.D., Virginia Woolf, Walter Pater, and T.S. Eliot developed an alternative conception of the self in light of the developing neuro-scientific account of our inner workings. Critics have long seen modernist writers as being concerned with an "impersonal" form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of an author's subjective personality. Walter argues that the charge of impersonality has been overblown and that the modernists did not want to entirely evacuate the self from writing. Rather, she argues, modernist writers embraced the kind of material and embodied notion of the self that resulted from the then-emerging physiological sciences. This work will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature, as well as scholars interested in the influence of science on literature"-- Provided by publisher.

"Western accounts of human vision before the nineteenth century tended to separate the bodily eye from the rational mind. This model gave way in the mid-nineteenth century to one in which the thinking subject, perceiving body, perceptual object, and material world could not be so easily separated. Christina Walter explores how this new physiology of vision provoked writers to reconceive the relations among image, text, sight, and subjectivity.Walter focuses in particular on the ways in which modernist writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot adapted modern optics and visual culture to develop an alternative to the self or person as a model of the human subject. Critics have long seen modernists as being concerned with an "impersonal" form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of its author's personality. Walter argues that scholars have misunderstood aesthetic impersonality as an evacuation of the person when it is instead an interrogation of what exactly goes into a personality. She shows that modernist impersonality embraced the embodied and incoherent notion of the human subject that resulted from contemporary physiological science, and traces the legacy of that impersonality in current affect theory. Optical Impersonality will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature and visual culture and to those interested in the intersections of art, literature, science, and technology"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

"2 Images of Incoherence: The Visual Body of H.D. Impersonaliste" "Mixing an Imagist Pigment: Modern Art, Science, and Materiality in Sea Garden"; "Sign-posting" Impersonality in Notes on Thought and Vision"; "Close Up and Impersonal: Subjectivity through the Camera Lens and the Talking Cure"; "Borderline's Aesthetic of Identity Dis-order"; "3 Getting Impersonal: Body Politics and Mina Loy's "Anti-Thesis of Self-Expression"; "Feminism and Faces: Staving Off the Threat of Impersonal Negation"; "Optical Experiments and a Poetics "Beyond the Personal"

"Insel in the Air": Weighing the Politics of Impersonality" 4 D. H. Lawrence's Impersonal Imperative: Vision, Bodies, and the Recovery of Identity"; "Chaos Lit Up by Visions": Poetic Attention and Its Material Limits"; "From Impersonality to Creative Identity": A Critical Sleight of Hand"; "Visual Evolution and Identitarian Futurity in Lady Chatterley's Lover"; ""5 Managing the "Feeling into Which We Cannot Peer": T. S. Eliot's Impersonal Matters"; "New and Wonderful Visions": The Science of Eliot's Impersonality."

"The Waste and Repair Land: Impersonality, but with Gender", "Redeeming the Still "Unread Vision": The Family Reunion's Dramatic Bodies"; "Afterword. Modernist Futurity: The "Creative Contagion" of Impersonality and Affect"; "A Shared Visual Vernacular: Affect Theory's Impersonality"; "Open Ended: Affecting Impersonality, Impersonalizing Affect"; "Notes"; "Bibliography"; "Index"

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4214-1364-7

OCLC:

883632105