Lesson plan
Camera Works
Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word is a work of literary and cultural studies by Michael North, a professor of English at UCLA. It is the winner of the 2006 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. In Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, North examines the relationship between literary modernism and new media technologies in the early twentieth century such as photography, advertising, and film. In doing so, North not only makes the case for "a deep and wide modernist interest... in new media of all kinds," but also provides a new way of reading modernism that locates some of its more formally innovative elements within writing's confrontation with the challenges and complications introduced by new media into "the supposed autonomy of the visual and thus into the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic." Focusing on technologies of mechanical recording and reproduction, which North asserts did nothing less than to reorganize human perception, the author argues that the codification and stylization of the recorded media, which paradoxically served, for example, to distance and aestheticize the world while simultaneously bringing it closer and making it more familiar, are encoded in modernism's heightened awareness of writing's own literariness, which called attention to its status as mediation and thus "complicated the process of representa…
Article summary
Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word is a work of literary and cultural studies by Michael North, a professor of English at UCLA. It is the winner of the 2006 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. In Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, North examines the relationship between literary modernism and new media technologies in the early twentieth century such as photography, advertising, and film. In doing so, North not only makes the case for "a deep and wide modernist interest... in new media of all kinds," but also provides a new way of reading modernism that locates some of its more formally innovative elements within writing's confrontation with the challenges and complications introduced by new media into "the supposed autonomy of the visual and thus into the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic." Focusing on technologies of mechanical recording and reproduction, which North asserts did nothing less than to reorganize human perception, the author argues that the codification and stylization of the recorded media, which paradoxically served, for example, to distance and aestheticize the world while simultaneously bringing it closer and making it more familiar, are encoded in modernism's heightened awareness of writing's own literariness, which called attention to its status as mediation and thus "complicated the process of representa…
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.