In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Modernist Literature and Culture)

In a post-digital media landscape tracked endlessly by streams and feeds of images, it is clearer than ever that photography is an art poised between arresting singularity and ambiguous plurality. Drawing on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a provocative new account of the relationship between photography and modernist literature--a literature which has long been considered to trace, in its formal experimentation, the influence of modern visual technologies. Making pioneering claims about the importance of photography to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alix Beeston traverses the history of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the composite experiments of Francis Galton to the epic portrait project of August Sander; from the surrealist self-fashioning of Claude Cahun to the reappropriation of lynching photographs by black activist groups; from the collectable postcards of Broadway stars to the glamour shots of Hollywood celebrities-these and other serialized photographic projects provide essential contexts for understanding the fragmentary, composite forms of literary modernism. In a series of richly detailed literary analyses, Beeston argues that the gaps and intervals of the composite literary text model the visual syntax of photography--as well as its silences, absences, and equivocations. In them, the social and political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. Moving in and out of these textual openings, In and Out of Sight pursues the fleeting, visible and invisible figure of the woman-in-series, who recasts absence and silence as forms of presence and witness. This shadowy figure emerges as central to the conceptual space of modernist literature--a terrain not only gendered but radically constructed around the instability of female bodies and their desires. ## Abstract This book reappraises the connections between modernist writing and photography in the light of new work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images. Arguing for the importance of photography to the work of four major modernist authors—Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—it proposes a new theory of composite literary form in the first half of the twentieth century. Segmented and reiterative, composite modernist writing is shaped by the figure of the woman-in-series, whose appearances and disappearances map its connective and disconnective structure. Understood in relation to the syntax of visual spacing in serial photography, the formal interstices that define modernist writing emerge as textual sites in which the dominant social and political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. These gaps signify both as marks of trauma, the wounds of representation according to typologies of race, gender, and class, and as a means for evading or defending against this trauma: a zone of withdrawal and recalcitrance for female characters. Moving in and out of sight, from presence to absence and back again, the woman-in-series in modernist writing destabilizes oppositions of power and vulnerability as they relate to the interactions of subjects and objects in the representational realm. Cover......Page 1 Half title......Page 2 Series......Page 3 In and Out of Sight......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 Foreword......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 14 Introduction: Things Normally Unseen......Page 20 1. Bodies Bad and Gentle: The Surrealist Convulsions of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives......Page 49 2. Black Flesh Is White Ash: Reframing Jean Toomer’s Cane......Page 85 3. Frozen in the Glassy, Bluestreaked Air: John Dos Passos’s Photographic Metropolis......Page 127 4. Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood Writing......Page 166 Coda: Shared Hallucinations......Page 207 Notes......Page 216 Works Cited......Page 250 Index......Page 272 Introduction: Things normally unseen -- Bodies bad and gentle: The surrealist convulsions of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives -- Black ash is white flesh: Reframing Jean Toomer's Cane -- Frozen in the glassy, bluestreaked air: John Dos Passos's photographic metropolis -- Torn, burned, and yet dancing: The Hollywood writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald -- CODA: Shared hallucinations "Building on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a new account of the relationship between photography and modernist writing--revealing the conceptual space of literary modernism to be radically constructed around the instability of female bodies"-- Provided by publisher