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Walter’s book certainly and productively opens up a rethinking of optical subjectivity, and offers engaging ways of critiquing the relationship between textual and imagistic form.
Christina Walter makes clear that hers is an account of impersonality whose critical stakes turn on their difference from previous scholarship on the topic.
Walter displays her "individual talent," which lies in showing not just how writers like Eliot manipulate impersonality toward their own ends, but also how critics’ misinterpretations of these maneuvers have led to an impoverished model of impersonal existence.
Just when you thought you knew your way around the modernist poetics of impersonality, Christina Walter comes to burn the maps. In the modernism she gives us, impersonality shares its im- at once with impasse and immersion: it names not just the 'extinction of personality,' in T. S. Eliot’s words, but also a deep engagement with personality’s limits and contingencies. Modernist writers came to this engagement, says Walter, through a physiological optics that put seeing back in the body and returned the subject to the object world. Optical Impersonality shows us the literary results of this embodiment: new forms of intersubjectivity, a move away from identitarian notions of the self, and varieties of collective politics—both left and right—distinct from liberal humanism.
Optical Impersonality ambitiously and compellingly theorizes the mutual interplay between the visual culture and technoscience of mid-nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century optics and modernist assaults on concepts of subjectivity. Walter provides nuanced new accounts of the work writers traditionally understood as espousing theories of aesthetic impersonality—Eliot, Pound, and H.D., for instance—but also reconsiders several who have not typically been seen as central to that project—such as Pater, Ford, and Loy. Walter’s refreshingly capacious interpretation of impersonality similarly enriches our understanding of the technoscience of the period. Optical Impersonality is a smart, philosophical, and historicized contribution to the field.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
352
ISBN
9781421413631
Illustration Description
30 halftones, 8 line drawings
Series
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Eye Don't See: Embodied Vision, Ontology, and Modernist Impersonality
The Visual Vernacular, Imagetextuality, and Modernism'sOptical Unconscious
The Modern Image and
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Eye Don't See: Embodied Vision, Ontology, and Modernist Impersonality
The Visual Vernacular, Imagetextuality, and Modernism'sOptical Unconscious
The Modern Image and Impersonality's Critique of Identity
1. A Protomodern Picture Impersonality: Walter Pater and Michael Field's Vision
Vision, Anders-streben, and Performance in The Renaissance
Pater contra Mérimée: Toward an Imperfect Impersonality
The Visual Field(s): Framing the Politics of Paterian Impersonality
2. Images of Incoherence: The Visual Body of H.D. Impersonaliste
Mixing an Imagist Pigment: Modern Art, Science, and Materiality in Sea Garden
"Sign-posting" Impersonality in Notes on Thought and Vision
Close Up and Impersonal: Subjectivity through the Camera Lens and the Talking Cure
Borderline's Aesthetic of Identity Dis-order
3. Getting Impersonal: Body Politics and Mina Loy's "Anti-Thesis of Self-Expression"
Feminism and Faces: Staving Off the Threat of Impersonal Negation
Optical Experiments and a Poetics "Beyond the Personal"
"Insel in the Air": Weighing the Politics of Impersonality
4. D. H. Lawrence's Impersonal Imperative: Vision, Bodies, and theRecovery of Identity
"Chaos Lit Up by Visions": Poetic Attention and Its Material Limits
From Impersonality to "Creative Identity": A Critical Sleight of Hand
Visual Evolution and Identitarian Futurity in Lady Chatterley's Lover
5. Managing the "Feeling into Which We Cannot Peer": T. S. Eliot'sImpersonal Matters
"New and Wonderful Visions": The Science of Eliot's Impersonality
The Waste and Repair Land: Impersonality, but with Gender
Redeeming the Still "Unread Vision": The Family Reunion's Dramatic Bodies
Afterword: Modernist Futurity: The "Creative Contagion" of Impersonality and Affect
A Shared Visual Vernacular: Affect Theory's Impersonality
Open Ended: Affecting Impersonality, Impersonalizing Affect
Notes
Bibliography
Index
