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.
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