Editorial Review:

The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with photography and film as well as the methods of observation used by the social sciences, Karen Jacobs identifies distinctly modernist kinds of observers and visual relationships.

This important reconception of modernism draws upon American, British, and French literary and extra-literary materials from the period 1900-1955. These texts share a sense of crisis about vision's capacity for violence and its inability to deliver reliable knowledge. Jacobs looks closely at the ways in which historical understandings of race and gender inflected visual relations in the modernist novel. She shows how modernist writers, increasingly aware of the body behind the neutral lens of the observer, used diverse strategies to displace embodiment onto those "others" historically perceived as cultural bodies in order to reimagine for themselves or their characters a "purified" gaze.

The Eye's Mind addresses works by such high modernists as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and (more distantly) Ralph Ellison and Maurice Blanchot, as well as those by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West which have been tentatively placed in the modernist canon although they forgo the full-blown experimental techniques often seen as synonymous with literary modernism. Jacobs reframes fundamental debates about modernist aesthetic practices by demonstrating how much those practices are indebted to the changing visual cultures of the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Illuminating:

I strongly recommend this critical study of the impact of visual culture on literary modernism. As the author notes in her introduction, while other books have appeared in recent years about "the primacy of the visual in modernism," these books have focused on the relationship between literature and the visual arts. What makes The Eye's Mind unique, and important, is its analysis of the new breed of "observer" who arises with the development of photographic and film technologies and the emergent discourses... more info

Twenty/twenty Vision!:

To say that Jacobs breaks new ground in an interdisciplinary study of Modernism would be more than an understatement. Jacobs has read widely and deeply across disciplines to produce an extraordinary account of the intersection of visual technologies and literary production. In addition to her adroit use of theory, Jacobs shows a fluid access to a range of literary texts. Her reading of Zora Neale Hurston, for example, draws on anthropological history to demonstrate the way ethnography helped to establish... more info

Similar Products:

A Room of One's Own (Annotated) by Virginia Woolf (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism by Nancy Armstrong (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation by W. J. T. Mitchell (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Ranciere (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

The Future of the Image by Jacques Ranciere (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolano (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology by W. J. T. Mitchell (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

On Photography by Susan Sontag (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours

Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis by Garrett Stewart (Paperback) - Usually ships in 24 hours