Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history, film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby reveals how photographers, filmmakers, and writers, even at their most kinetic, did not surrender attention to points of stillness. Rather, the still image, understood through photography, establishes itself as a mode of resistance and provides a formal response to various modernist efforts to see better, to attend more closely, and to remove the fetters of subjectivity and experience. Still Modernism brings together a series of canonical texts, films, and photographs, the selection of which reinforces the central claim that stillness does not lurk at the margins of modernism, but was constitutive of its very foundations. In a series of comparisons drawing from literary and visual objects, Hornby argues that still photography allows film to access its own diffuse images of motion; photography's duplicative form provides a serial structure for modernist efforts to represent the face; its iterative structure articulates the jerky rhythms of experimental narrative as perambulation; and its processes of development allow for the world to emerge independent of the human observer. Casting new light on the relationship between photography and film, Hornby situates the struggle between the still and the kinetic at the center of modernist culture.

About the Author
Louise Hornby is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews
As the brilliant Still Modernism gives us the shock of the still, it also puts us to work, sets us in motion, to slip beyond the canon of moving modernisms to a modernism obstructed, arrested, made strange. * Alix Beeston, Modernism/modernity *
This sense of haunting is very much at the heart of Louise Hornby's Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film, which considers the essential stillness of photography-rather than the perceived motion of cinema-as a quietly powerful undercurrent in the modernist reimagining of literature ... Hornby's writing on stillness is dynamic and fluid, gracefully blending photography, film, literature, and cultural theory in invigorating ways. * Keith Hopper, Notes and Queries *
An accomplished and endlessly provocative study that takes complex visual theory by way of Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell and others, and parses it down into thoughtful case studies, Still Modernism is a triumphant, unique work on visual and textual culture that acts as a bulwark against the marching juggernaut of modernism. * William Carroll , Screen *
Still Modernism is an important book for those who wish to continue to reflect on the world of light, words, and stills that continues to surround us. * Massimo Bacigalupo, Modern Language Review *
As the brilliant Still Modernism gives us the shock of the still, it also puts us to work, sets us in motion, to slip beyond the canon of moving modernisms to a modernism obstructed, arrested, made strange. * Alix Beeston, Modernism/modernity *
This sense of haunting is very much at the heart of Louise Hornby's Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film, which considers the essential stillness of photography-rather than the perceived motion of cinema-as a quietly powerful undercurrent in the modernist reimagining of literature ... Hornby's writing on stillness is dynamic and fluid, gracefully blending photography, film, literature, and cultural theory in invigorating ways. * Keith Hopper, Notes and Queries *
An accomplished and endlessly provocative study that takes complex visual theory by way of Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell and others, and parses it down into thoughtful case studies, Still Modernism is a triumphant, unique work on visual and textual culture that acts as a bulwark against the marching juggernaut of modernism. * William Carroll , Screen *
Still Modernism is an important book for those who wish to continue to reflect on the world of light, words, and stills that continues to surround us. * Massimo Bacigalupo, Modern Language Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197626047
Author Louise Hornby
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 367g
Dimensions(mm) 156mm * 236mm * 13mm