Introduction: Things Normally Unseen
Chapter 1: Bodies Bad and Gentle: The Surrealist Convulsions of
Gertrude Stein's Three Lives
Chapter 2: Black Flesh is White Ash: Reframing Jean Toomer's
Cane
Chapter 3: Frozen in the Glassy, Bluestreaked Air: John Dos
Passos's Photographic Metropolis
Chapter 4: Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing: The Hollywood Writing of
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Coda: Shared Hallucinations
Works Cited
Alix Beeston is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Cardiff University, Wales.
Beestons methodology has all the hallmarks and pleasures of the
current trend in literary studies that blends theoretical
subtlety—ably moving between the various branches of media and
visual studies, as well as feminist theory and theories of
modernity—with archival detail. ... This is an exciting debut, one
which discloses through its study of the past consequential
insights about how we intercept and areintercepted by mediated
forms in our present.
*Feminist Modernist Studies *
Beeston's probing, artful, and original In and Out of Sight:
Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen extends and redirects
[the] dialogue between modernist literature and visual media. ...
In and Out of Sight is a genuinely interdisciplinary project; its
author is as conversant in moving-image studies as she is in
modernist literary studies. Beeston sustains her range of
references through what she identifies as a sort of critical
montage, a methodology that poses important questions for the
future of modernist studies. ... Beeston encodes her 'strong'
combination of theoretical, formalist, and archival rigor within an
open—composite, fractured, sutured—reading practice. It is this
openness...that is sure to make it durable for generations of
future scholars.
*Stephen Pasqualina, Modernism/modernity*
In and Out of Sight is powered by a truly interdisciplinary
gathering of proofs and examples taken from photography,
literature, history, and theory from the modernist moment and our
own. [This book] may be the most thrilling offering of 2018".
*Shawna Ross, The Year's Work in English Studies*
Alix Beeston's bold and challenging new book offers a corrective to
[Gertrude] Stein's statement of filmic equivalence, asking that we
linger instead with the strangeness of photography when trying to
account for literary modernism's interest in serial form. â Beeston
carefully establishes a body of criticism into which her own book
might be situated and forges an exciting direction for future work
in modernist studies, photography and literature, still-moving
studies, and feminist studies.
*Louise Hornby , University of California, Los Angeles , Modern
Language Review*
Beeston's impressive first book makes significant contributions not
just to the reading of literary and visual modernism but to the
understanding of gender, race, and class in twentieth-century
American culture... The theoretical and critical analyses of In and
Out of Sight reveal how the tensions of the photographic unseen and
the still-moving field exist in the representations of gender,
race, and class that American visual or verbal images and texts
subordinate.
*Joseph R. Millichap , MFS Modern Fiction StudiesÂ*
Alix Beeston's In and Out of Sight is one of several exciting and
innovative accounts of the relation between literature and
photography to appear in recent years, studies that have charted a
new course for the field away from a focus on questions of realism
and indexicality... the readings that emerge are powerful and
persuasive... [it] is a welcome contribution to modernist and
visual studies, persuasive evidence that these intertwined fields
remain as vibrant as ever.
*Stuart Burrows, American Literary History *
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