In keeping with the title of Alix Beeston's ambitious book on modernist writing and photography, In and Out of Sight weaves a complex argument concerning what the author calls “the gendered and racialized logics of inclusion and exclusion that continue to define the limits of modernist literature” (5). The book's aim, in this sense, is to open up the visual aspects of modernism in order to reframe how those traditionally othered by modernist practice can be relocated and, in a sense, re-seen. Not unlike Stuart Burrows's A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839–1945, it deliberately sets out to work as a malleable examination into how the visual, as filtered through photography in particular, operates within certain canonical modernist texts. As in Burrows's case, rather than reiterate the by now fairly well-trodden argument that modernism's adoption of the camera eye allows us to define the narrative...
Modernism in Focus
CAROLINE BLINDER is reader in American literature and culture with a specialization in the intersections between literature and visual culture, in particular twentieth-century American writing and documentary photography. Her first book was A Self-made Surrealist—Ideology and Aesthetics in the work of Henry Miller (2000). She has published extensively on photo-textual intersections and is the editor of New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (2010). She has published widely on both European photographers Brassaï, André Kertész, and Robert Doisneau and on US photographer-writers Wright Morris, Walker Evans, and Weegee, among others. Her monograph The American Photo-Text: 1930–1960 (2019)—a critical survey of documentary studies of the United States—traces the collaborative efforts of a number of seminal writers and photographers. Dr. Blinder is peer reviewer for the journal Modernism/modernity, series reviewer for Key Readings in Photography for Bloomsbury Press, and the series editor for Palgrave Macmillan's series on photography.
Caroline Blinder; Modernism in Focus. Novel 1 November 2019; 52 (3): 479–483. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-7738767
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