Cinematic Modernism
Modernist Poetry and Film

A study of the interactions between the techniques of avant-garde cinema and modernist poetry.

Susan McCabe (Author)

9780521114837, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 June 2009

296 pages, 20 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

"[An] ambitious, innovative study ... [with] bold juxtapositions of ideas.... McCabe's linkages are precise, original, and bibliographically extensive. Her network of inquiry discovers connective neurons from modernist poems and film scenarios to psychological, literary and film theories of past and recent publication. She proves the range of "cinematic modernism" to be wide, deep, and generative."
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

Susan McCabe juxtaposes the work of four American modernist poets with the techniques and themes of early twentieth-century European avant-garde films. The historical experience of World War One and its aftermath of broken and shocked bodies shaped a preoccupation with fragmentation in both film and literature. Film, montage and camera work provided poets with a vocabulary through which to explore and refashion modern physical and metaphoric categories of the body, including the hysteric, automaton, bisexual and femme fatale. This innovative study explores the impact of new cinematic modes of representation on the poetry of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Cinematic Modernism links the study of literary forms with film studies, visual culture, gender studies and psychoanalysis to expand the usual parameters of literary modernism.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgement
List of abbreviations
Introduction: cinematic modernism
1. Modernism, male hysteria and montage
2. 'Delight in dislocation': Stein, Chaplin and Man Ray
3. William Carlos Williams and surrealist film: 'a favourable distortion'
4. H. D.'s borderline bodies
5. Marianne Moore: film, fetishism and her 'Ballet Mécanique'
Conclusion: modern dissociation and All About Eve
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Films, cinema [APF]