A.L. Coburn
A01=Zachary Tavlin
aesthetic philosophy
Aesthetics and perception
American cultural history
American literary criticism
American literary studies
American literature
Art and literature
Author_Zachary Tavlin
bell hooks
camera obscura
Category=DSBF
Charlie Chaplin
coloniality
counter-narrative
cultural exchange
Derek Walcott
Eadweard Muybridge
Elizabeth Bishop
embodiment
Emily Dickinson
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fiction
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
gaze
Glance
Henry James
historiography
Hudson River School
Hudson School
imagism
imagist poetics
impressionism
Impressionism and early cinema
Jacques Lacan
Jean-Paul Sartre
John Berger
Kamau Braithwaite
Laura Mulvey
literary history
Literary modernism origins
Literary responses to photography and film
literary theory
Marcel Duchamp
masculine gaze
materiality
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Media studies
Michael Fried
Michel Foucault
modernism
Nathaniel Hawthorne
nineteenth century
Nineteenth-century American literature
Non-possessive ways of seeing
phenomenology
poetics
portraiture
Ralph Waldo Emerson
romanticism
Shawn Michelle Smith
subjectivity
Svetlana Alpers
techne
Thomas Cole
Thomas Eakins
twentieth century
visual arts
visual culture
Visual culture and literature
visual grammar
visual practice
visual rhetoric
Visual subjectivity
visual theory
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
William Cullen Bryant
William James
Product details
- ISBN 9780817360894
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Jun 2023
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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How the “glance” rather than the “gaze” in nineteenth-century literature and art anticipates the turn to modernism
The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. But many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the “possessive gaze,” signaling a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counternarrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things.
Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of the imagination at a turning point in the history of photography, when momentary glances take on new narrative potentials. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies—the sentimental gaze and the slave trader’s glance—highlighting the life-and-death stakes of looking and looking away. Emily Dickinson’s syntactical oddities and her lifelong process of stitching and unstitching the poems that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to immanence associated with animal perception. Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James’s vexed relationship to painterly Impressionism and William Carlos Williams’s imagist poetics as a response to early cinema’s use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar.
Each of these literary artists—via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them—refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for the twentieth century’s twist on modernity. Glancing Visions will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and literary history, visual culture, visual theory, aesthetic philosophy, and phenomenology.
The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. But many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the “possessive gaze,” signaling a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counternarrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things.
Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of the imagination at a turning point in the history of photography, when momentary glances take on new narrative potentials. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies—the sentimental gaze and the slave trader’s glance—highlighting the life-and-death stakes of looking and looking away. Emily Dickinson’s syntactical oddities and her lifelong process of stitching and unstitching the poems that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to immanence associated with animal perception. Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James’s vexed relationship to painterly Impressionism and William Carlos Williams’s imagist poetics as a response to early cinema’s use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar.
Each of these literary artists—via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them—refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for the twentieth century’s twist on modernity. Glancing Visions will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and literary history, visual culture, visual theory, aesthetic philosophy, and phenomenology.
Zachary Tavlin is adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, ESQ, J19, English, Continental Philosophy Review, and Wallace Stevens Journal, among other places.
