Photographic modernism: The pursuit of objectivity.

摘要

This dissertation addresses the ways in which literary modernism is underwritten by the pursuit of objective forms of visual knowledge, and turns to the technology and forms of photography to radically revise notions of visual epistemology in the early twentieth-century. In literary studies, photography has been associated primarily with nineteenth century realism rather than modernist representation. This technological bias is occasioned, on the one hand, by modernism's association with new strategies of representing subjectivity; and, on the other hand, by a determinism that positions cinema as the dominant scopic regime of modernism. By comparing a corpus of novels and photographs and theorizing modernism as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, the dissertation works against such orthodoxies, and recuperates the objective discourses and scientific techniques of photography within modernism.; Authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein---writers who have been repeatedly linked to the representation of subjectivity---were poised to recuperate and revitalize notions of objectivity and visual knowledge without resorting to a naive realism. Their turn to new notions of objectivity in modernism is attended by a turn toward the discourses and technology of photography, which disrupts the bond between subjectivity and vision, and alters the terms of visual epistemology. The contradictory yet defining conditions of photography---its singularity and its multiplicity---situate photography at the center of modernism's vexed relationship to the image, and provide the parameters for a historically grounded understanding of modernist objectivity.; The subject and methodology of the dissertation both run slightly against the grain: the verbal experimentation in modernist literature has frequently been read in the context of visual technology, in particular, the context of film. I ultimately argue against positioning cinema as the foil for modernist literature, taking instead as my subject high modernist authors and photographers representative of their ilk. Each chapter is essentially comparative---rather than using analogy or influence as models for interdisciplinary inquiry, I engage parallel histories of literature and photography and reveal their shared preoccupation with specific registers of objectivity and instrumentality.