The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture

Karen Jacobs

Published by Cornell University Press 2000

The Eye's Mind

Literary Modernism and Visual Culture

Karen Jacobs

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501725814

Overview
Contents

About this book

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...

Author / Editor information

Karen Jacobs is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Reviews

This is a lucid, well-researched and documented book that successfully contributes to the critical reimagining of the field of Modernism that has been taking place for the past 20+ years.

The Eye's Mind offers a richly synthetic account of modernism's visual subjects. Indeed, Jacobs is among the first to situate literary modernism within a systematic analysis of visual culture, one that draws on the work of Martin Jay, Luce Irigaray, Susan Bordo, and Robyn Wiegman (among others).... Jacob's strength as a critic lies in her ability to offer fresh, complex readings of theoretical and literary texts and to juxtapose them in surprising and productive ways.

Barbara Green, University of Notre Dame:

Karen Jacobs' analysis is often breathtaking, while the wide range of texts she examines is crucial to a remapping of the literary terrain of modernity. The Eye's Mind is essential reading and a unique contribution to the study of visual culture.

James F. English, University of Pennsylvania:

A fine book on a topic of real importance, full of smart prose and ingenious arguments, The Eye's Mind is an impressive and theoretically sophisticated piece of work by an outstanding reader of the modernist novel.

The Eye's Mind is a study of literary modernism that we have needed for a long while. Our post-structuralist obsession with visuality is everywhere apparent; but it has taken a scholar with Karen Jacobs's deep learning and range of knowledge to help us understand.... She is able to do this, and to do this so well, because her study is genuinely interdisciplinary; its primary strength lies precisely in its synthetic and comparativist aims.

Jacobs presents a truly fresh analysis of the impact of visual culture on modernist literature.... A consistent, synthetic study that does not disintegrate into theoretical chaos; rather, the integration of all these perspectives into a clear, focused argument is impressive and refreshing.

A highly nuanced picture of the racial and sexual frames of the modernists eye's mind.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
1. Introduction: Modernism and the Body as Afterimage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I: THE EYE IN THE TEXT
2. The Eye's Mind: Self-Detection in James's The Sacred Fount and Nabokov's The Eye Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Two Mirrors Facing: Freud, Blanchot, and the Logic of Invisibility Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
PART II: THE BODY VISIBLE IN THE LENS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE
4. From "Spyglass" to "Horizon": Tracking the Anthropological Gaze in Zora Neale Hurston Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
5. One-Eyed Jacks and Three-Eyed Monsters: Visualizing Embodiment in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
PART III: AUDIENCE AND SPECTACLE
6. Spectacles of Violence, Stages of Art: Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf's Dialectic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
7. Modernist Seductions: Materializing Mass Culture in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Postscript: From "Our Glass Lake" to "Hourglass Lake": Photo/graphic Memory in Nabokov's Lolita Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	264
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Keywords: Photography; Art History

eBook

Published: September 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501725814