Capturing character: Photography, race, and identity in modern American literature

In my dissertation, I argue that while photography is often thought of as being incapable of escaping narrativization, modern narrative fiction in the United States is anchored in what I call photographization---producing texts on the basis of photographic imagery. The rise of modernist American and African American fiction depended heavily on modern photography. Consequently, American modernism differed from that in Europe, yet was influenced by European artists. This modernism entailed pivotal shifts in notions of identity, authority, and authorship. I focus on a handful of exemplary authors who engaged in intermedia relations and allow us to trace these shifts in a detailed, rigorous way. They include Frederick Douglass and Harold Frederic (who I argue are proto-modernists), Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and Charles Chesnutt. Finding their readability challenged in moments of personal and historical crisis (abolitionism, the Great War, expatriatism, migration), they called on photography to provide the images that words alone failed to reproduce. While some included actual images in their work, others invoked photography as a theme or used words to replicate what photographic images do in their quest for creating images in words. I show how they were all able to reconstruct an identity and public image that would be missing had they not turned to photography.;My dissertation is the first full-length study that examines the role photography has had beyond the simple reproduction of the self in fiction. Moreover, it is the first work that links it to the comparative context of specific moments of crisis that produce a particular need for the convergence of photography and fiction in order to be readable. While most critics argue that photography is a privileged place for reproducing an easily recognizable self, I demonstrate that it is called upon to compensate for a more elusive and abstract self, the self in distress. This two-sided potential has another serious implication. While photography has sometimes been taken as an essential metaphor for a democratic aesthetic, its proclivity to depict power relations in conjunction with words also opens up the possibility of repression. I thus uncover how photography in fiction can become complicit in the tyranny that threatens the self whose goal is political or aesthetic emancipation. Throughout, I provide an integrated reading and viewing of both media for a more complete understanding of the complicated notion of a self that cannot easily be pinned down.