{"product_id":"optical-impersonality-christina-walter-9781421413631","title":"Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eExamines modernist writers' efforts to map the social implications of an evolving science of vision and visual culture.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWestern 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWalter 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eOptical Impersonality \u003c\/i\u003ewill 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Christina Walter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1421413639\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781421413631\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Johns Hopkins University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/08\/2014\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 352\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.33lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.34h x 6.30w x 1.08d","brand":"Christina Walter","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48088211915007,"sku":"9781421413631","price":62.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_96668a0e-6828-4329-b877-13c0a5f3aa51.jpg?v=1769103676","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/optical-impersonality-christina-walter-9781421413631","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}