The Eye's Mind

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

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Modernism and the Body as Afterimage

1

(44)

PART I: The Eye in the Text

45

(236)

The Eye's Mind: Self-Detection in James's The Sacred Fount and Nabokov's The Eye

47

(32)

Two Mirrors Facing: Freud, Blanchot, and the Logic of Invisibility

79

(32)

PART II: The Body Visible in the Lens of American Social Science

From ``Spyglass'' to ``Horizon'': Tracking the Anthropological Gaze in Zora Neale Hurston

111

(34)

One-Eyed Jacks and Three-Eyed Monsters: Visualizing Embodiment in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

145

(58)

PART III: Audience and Spectacle

Spectacles of Violence, Stages of Art: Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf's Dialectic

203

(40)

Modernist Seductions: Materializing Mass Culture in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust

243

(21)

Postscript: From ``Our Glass Lake'' to ``Hourglass Lake'': Photo/graphic Memory in Nabokov's Lolita

264

(17)

Bibliography

281

(22)

Index

303

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