Optical Impersonality
Regular price
€61.50
A01=Christina Walter
affect
Author_Christina Walter
Category=DSA
D.H. Lawrence
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
H.D.
image
impersonality
Mina Loy
modernism
optics
science
T.S. Eliot
vision
Walter Pater
Product details
- ISBN 9781421413631
- Weight: 612g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Sep 2014
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Western accounts of human vision before the nineteenth century tended to separate the bodily eye from the rational mind. This model gave way in the mid-nineteenth century to one in which the thinking subject, perceiving body, perceptual object, and material world could not be so easily separated. Christina Walter explores how this new physiology of vision provoked writers to reconceive the relations among image, text, sight, and subjectivity. Walter focuses in particular on the ways in which modernist writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot adapted modern optics and visual culture to develop an alternative to the self or person as a model of the human subject. Critics have long seen modernists as being concerned with an "impersonal" form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of its author's personality. Walter argues that scholars have misunderstood aesthetic impersonality as an evacuation of the person when it is instead an interrogation of what exactly goes into a personality.
She shows that modernist impersonality embraced the embodied and incoherent notion of the human subject that resulted from contemporary physiological science, and traces the legacy of that impersonality in current affect theory. Optical Impersonality will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature and visual culture and to those interested in the intersections of art, literature, science, and technology.
Christina Walter is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland.
