Optical impersonality : science, images, and literary modernism / Christina Walter.

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

"Christina Walter brings the next offering to the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series. Her work looks at the influence of the modern science of visual perception a variety of modernist writers. Walter focuses in particular on the way in which writers like H.D., Virgina Woolf, Walter Pater, and T.S. Eliot developed an alternative conception of the self in light of the developing neuro-scientific account of our inner workings. Critics have long seen modernist writers as being concerned with an "impersonal" form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of an author's subjective personality. Walter argues that the charge of impersonality has been overblown and that the modernists did not want to entirely evacuate the self from writing. Rather, she argues, modernist writers embraced the kind of material and embodied notion of the self that resulted from the then-emerging physiological sciences. This work will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature, as well as scholars interested in the influence of science on literature"-- Provided by publisher.

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

x, 339 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Introduction. Eye don't see: embodied vision, ontology, and modernist impersonality -- A protomodern picture impersonality: Walter Pater and Michael Field's vision -- Images of incoherence: the visual body of H.D. impersonaliste -- Getting impersonal: body politics and Mina Loy's "anti-thesis of self-expression" -- D.H. Lawrence's impersonal imperative: vision, bodies, and the recovery of identity -- Managing the "feeling into which we cannot peer": T.S.Eliot's impersonal matters -- Afterword. Modernist futurity: the "creative contagion" of impersonality and affect.

Includes bibliographical references and index.