Show simple item record

dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1951/59842
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11401/71392
dc.description.sponsorshipThis work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.en_US
dc.formatMonograph
dc.format.mediumElectronic Resourceen_US
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherThe Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
dc.typeDissertation
dcterms.abstractThis dissertation examines the relationship between modern women writers and photography. Modernism was long understood as being opposed to mass culture and mediums of mass production, but this project argues that the movement was in fact dependent upon women's engagement with mass cultural forms, like photographs and the magazines that presented the images. I argue that modern women writers thematically and stylistically integrated photography to critique a complicated and evolving visual culture, one in which a woman's mechanically copied appearance became an increasingly vital means for her to express her subjectivity. Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag incorporated photography in their texts and, in the process, expressed the challenges of being modern and a woman in a visual landscape increasingly dominated by mass-produced images of their physical forms. These writers embraced the challenges that visual culture presented to them even while they, and their characters, sometimes struggled, and even collapsed, from the resulting pressures of appearing. As a result, I demonstrate that references to specific photographs, the practice of posing for photographs and the media that contextualized and distributed these photographs gave these writers the resources to loosen the binaries that insisted on women's passivity, such as subject and object, copy and original, and text and image. These disruptions, I further argue, are essential to the evolving classification of the modernist period. My emphasis on texts that feature elements of autobiography further reveals that, by disturbing the line between text and image, these writers also redraw genre distinctions. I conclude with an analysis of the most recent images by artist Cindy Sherman to demonstrate how contemporary work can further inform our understanding of women's role in literary modernism.
dcterms.available2013-05-22T17:35:30Z
dcterms.available2015-04-24T14:47:23Z
dcterms.contributorChoi, Helenen_US
dcterms.contributorOlster, Stacey , Marshik, Celiaen_US
dcterms.contributorGreen, Barbara.en_US
dcterms.creatorRosenblum, Lauren M.
dcterms.dateAccepted2013-05-22T17:35:30Z
dcterms.dateAccepted2015-04-24T14:47:23Z
dcterms.dateSubmitted2013-05-22T17:35:30Z
dcterms.dateSubmitted2015-04-24T14:47:23Z
dcterms.descriptionDepartment of Englishen_US
dcterms.extent204 pg.en_US
dcterms.formatMonograph
dcterms.formatApplication/PDFen_US
dcterms.identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/1951/59842
dcterms.identifierRosenblum_grad.sunysb_0771E_11188en_US
dcterms.identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/11401/71392
dcterms.issued2012-12-01
dcterms.languageen_US
dcterms.provenanceMade available in DSpace on 2013-05-22T17:35:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rosenblum_grad.sunysb_0771E_11188.pdf: 79157154 bytes, checksum: 24060e77e6b478d60ef9033bbe51d9e1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1en
dcterms.provenanceMade available in DSpace on 2015-04-24T14:47:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 Rosenblum_grad.sunysb_0771E_11188.pdf.jpg: 1894 bytes, checksum: a6009c46e6ec8251b348085684cba80d (MD5) Rosenblum_grad.sunysb_0771E_11188.pdf.txt: 380771 bytes, checksum: e74a8a9990e9f0ac868039ac52f85505 (MD5) Rosenblum_grad.sunysb_0771E_11188.pdf: 79157154 bytes, checksum: 24060e77e6b478d60ef9033bbe51d9e1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1en
dcterms.publisherThe Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
dcterms.subjectLiterature
dcterms.subjectmass, photograph, production, visual, wodernism, women
dcterms.titleSmart Ladies Sit Still: Women, Modernism and Photography
dcterms.typeDissertation


Files in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record