NORTH, Michael, Camera Works. Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, 272 p.
ISBN 978-0-19-533293-3
RÉSUMÉ
Camera Works is about the impactof photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artistsand writers, these new media offered hope of new means ofrepresentation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in akind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new mediaintroduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence ofthe senses. For theavant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in itsmost concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurouswriters they constituted an element of modern experience that couldhardly be ignored.
Camera Worksthus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlanticavant-garde, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was toturn stories and poems intostrips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on theavant-garde is traced from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to hismagazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of soundin the late 1920's.
Subseguent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoymentbrought into modern Americanfiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls "spectroscopic gayety,"the enjoyable diorientation of the senses by machine perception, turnsout to be a powerful force in much American fiction. The revolutionarypossibilities of this new spectatorship and its limitations are pursuedthrough a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James WeldonJohnson, and Hemingway. Together, thesechapters offer a new and substantially different account of therelationship between modern American literature and the mediatizedsociety of the early twentieth century.
With a comprehensive introduction and detailed particular readings, Camera Works substantiates a new understanding of the formal and historical bases ofmodernism. It argues that when modern literature and art respondto modernity, on a formal level, they are responding to theintervention of technology in the transmission of meaning, anintervention that unsettles all the terms in the essential relationshipof human consciousness to the world of phenomena.