Optical Impersonality

Christina Walter is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Eye Don't See: Embodied Vision, Ontology, and Modernist ImpersonalityThe Visual Vernacular, Imagetextuality, and Modernism'sOptical UnconsciousThe Modern Image and Impersonality's Critique of Identity1. A Protomodern Picture Impersonality: Walter Pater and Michael Field's VisionVision, Anders-streben, and Performance in The RenaissancePater contra Mérimée: Toward an Imperfect ImpersonalityThe Visual Field(s): Framing the Politics of Paterian Impersonality2. Images of Incoherence: The Visual Body of H.D. ImpersonalisteMixing an Imagist Pigment: Modern Art, Science, and Materiality in Sea Garden"Sign-posting" Impersonality in Notes on Thought and VisionClose Up and Impersonal: Subjectivity through the Camera Lens and the Talking CureBorderline's Aesthetic of Identity Dis-order3. Getting Impersonal: Body Politics and Mina Loy's "Anti-Thesis of Self-Expression"Feminism and Faces: Staving Off the Threat of Impersonal NegationOptical Experiments and a Poetics "Beyond the Personal""Insel in the Air": Weighing the Politics of Impersonality4. D. H. Lawrence's Impersonal Imperative: Vision, Bodies, and theRecovery of Identity"Chaos Lit Up by Visions": Poetic Attention and Its Material LimitsFrom Impersonality to "Creative Identity": A Critical Sleight of HandVisual Evolution and Identitarian Futurity in Lady Chatterley's Lover5. Managing the "Feeling into Which We Cannot Peer": T. S. Eliot'sImpersonal Matters"New and Wonderful Visions": The Science of Eliot's ImpersonalityThe Waste and Repair Land: Impersonality, but with GenderRedeeming the Still "Unread Vision": The Family Reunion's Dramatic BodiesAfterword: Modernist Futurity: The "Creative Contagion" of Impersonality and AffectA Shared Visual Vernacular: Affect Theory's ImpersonalityOpen Ended: Affecting Impersonality, Impersonalizing AffectNotesBibliographyIndex

Walter's book certainly and productively opens up a rethinking of optical subjectivity, and offers engaging ways of critiquing the relationship between textual and imagistic form. British Society for Literature and Science Christina Walter makes clear that hers is an account of impersonality whose critical stakes turn on their difference from previous scholarship on the topic. Isis Walter displays her "individual talent," which lies in showing not just how writers like Eliot manipulate impersonality toward their own ends, but also how critics' misinterpretations of these maneuvers have led to an impoverished model of impersonal existence. Journal of Modern Literature