Literature and Visual Technologies
Literature and Visual Technologies Writing After Cinema Edited by Julian Murphet and Lvdia Rainford
Introduction, editorial matter and selection Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford 2003 Chapter 1 Colin Maccabe 2003 All other chapters Palgrave Macmillan Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-1-4039-1308-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RGZl 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51170-9 DOI 10.1057/9780230389991 ISBN 978-0-230-38999-1 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Literature and visual technologies: writing after cinema I edited by Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion pictures and literature. 2. Television and literature. Murphet, Julian. II. Rainford, Lydia, 1972- PN 1995.3.L565 2003 791.43'6-dc21 2003053612 10 12 9 11 8 7 6 10 09 08 5 4 3 07 06 05 2 1 04 03
For Nathaniel Oliver
List of Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements ix x xii Introduction 1 Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford Parameters 1. On Impurity: the Dialectics of Cinema and Literature 15 Colin MacCabe, 2. How Newness Enters the World: the Birth of Cinema and the Origins of Man Laura Marcus 29 Modernisms 3. International Media, International Modernism, and the Struggle with Sound Michael North 49 4. Gertrude Stein's Machinery of Perception 67 Julian Murphet 5. H.D.'s The Gift an 'endless storeroom of film' 82 Rachel Connor 6. Ulysses in Toontown: 'vision animated to bursting point' in Joyce's 'Circe' Keith Williams 96 Bridges 7. Len Lye and Laura Riding in the 1930s: the Impossibility of Film and Literature 125 Tim Armstrong 8. Writing the Alphabet of Cinema: Blaise Cendrars 137 Eric Robertson 9. The Grammar of Time: Photography, Modernism and History 155 Elena Gualtieri
viii Contents After the Modern 10. How to Read the Image? Beckett's Televisual Memory 177 Lydia Rainford 11. Writing Images, Images of Writing: Tom Phillips's A Humument and Peter Greenaway's Textual Cinema 197 Paula Geyh and Arkady Plotnitsky Index 215
List of Illustrations Plates appear between pp. 66-67. 1. Fig. 1. Kenneth MacPherson in a publicity still for Wing Beat, published in Close-Up 1.1 (July, 1927). 2. Fig. 2. H.D. in a publicity still for Wing Beat, published in Close-Up 1.1 (July, 1927). 3. Fig. 3. Voyage to the Congo, published in Close-Up, 1.1 (July, 1927).
Notes on Contributors Tim Armstrong is Reader in Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (1998) and Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000). Rachel Connor is a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of a monograph, H.D. and the image (forthcoming from Manchester University Press) and is currently working on a critical edition of H.D.'s unpublished prose manuscript, 'Majic Ring'. She has also published on contemporary American writing and on European cinema. Paula Geyh is an assistant professor of English at Yeshiva University, where she teaches 20th-century American and European literature and literary theory. She is a co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology and is presently at work on a book on representations of the postmodern city and cyberspace. Elena Gualtieri lives in Brighton, where she lectures in English at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Virginia Woolfs Essays: Sketching the Past (London: Macmillan, 2000). Her work on Proust and Musil is part of a wider project on the intersection between writing and photography in the first half of the twentieth century. Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh where he has taught since 1985. He has also taught as Professor of English at the University of Exeter since 1998. His most recent publication is Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (Bloomsbury 2003) Laura Marcus is Reader in English at the University of Sussex. She has published books on theories of auto/biography, psychoanalysis, and Virginia Woolf. She is currently co-editing the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, and working on a study of cinema and modernism.
Notes on Contributors xi Julian Murphet is a lecturer at the Department of English, University of Sydney. He has published on Los Angeles fiction and postmodernism. Michael North is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent books are Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford, 1999) and the Norton Critical Edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (2001). He is currently at work on a new study of the visual arts, spectatorship, and modern literature. Arkady Plotnitsky is a Professor of English and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University, where he is also a Director of Theory and Cultural Studies Program. His most recent book is The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and 'The Two Cultures' (2002). He is currently completing two books, Minute Particulars: Romanticism, Science, and Epistemology and Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy. Lydia Rainford is a Junior Research Fellow at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. She has published on Samuel Beckett, modern literature and theory. Eric Robertson is Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Writing Between the Lines (1995), a study of the bilingual novelist Rene Schickele, and co-editor of Yvan Goll - Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts (1997), and has published various articles and book chapters on twentieth-century poetry and visual arts. He is currently completing a book on the artist, sculptor and poet Hans Jean Arp, to be published by Yale University Press. Keith Williams is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. He has published widely on aspects of Modernism and visual technology and culture, including British Writers and the Media 1930-45 (19%). He is currently working on studies of film and the work of both James Joyce and H.G. Wells.
Acknowledgements The editors would like to acknowledge the assistance of St John's College, Oxford for supporting the initial idea of this book. Professor John Kelly was an indispensable ally in these early stages. Katy Mullin deserves many thanks for all her help and extensive involvement in this project. Dominic Oliver has been an invaluable helpmate throughout. Chapter 7 by Tun Armstrong appeared first in the Forum for Modem Language Studies, vol. XXXVII (2), 2001. We are grateful to Oxford University Press for granting permission to republish this material.