Camera Works: Photography and The Twentieth-Century Word - Synopsis

Synopsis

The study is divided into three major sections. An introduction gives a brief history of the emergence of mechanically recorded media in the middle to late nineteenth century, advances in these technologies in the early twentieth century, and their formal and historical significance for modern writing of the same period. Focusing on photography, which North shows functions as a kind of "modern writing" itself, the author suggests that "perhaps the common beginning of modernism in literature and the arts is to be found in the recording technologies that brought the whole relationship of word, sound, and image into doubt."

Three chapters on little magazines examine in more detail debates on the artistic status of both photography and early silent film, the representational status of the new media in general, and what North terms the "crisis of sound" beginning in 1927 with the introduction of sound technologies into the silent cinema.

Four chapters on individual American authors with a conclusion apply certain concepts within these debates on the new media to particular works of literature both familiar and relatively obscure in order to, as North states, "pose a significant test for the ideas proposed" in his book.