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''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.〔(MSA Book Prize ), The Modernist Studies Association, retrieved 2008-12-27〕 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," 〔North, Michael. ''Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 246.〕 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 representation" by destabilizing the word.〔 Conceding that any aesthetic movement as complex as modernism must be the result of numerous influences, North proposes that it was this "complicat(of ) the process of representation," produced in writing's confrontation with new media technologies that both extended human perception and undermined confidence in perception itself, that gave rise to a modernist fascination with experimentation and formal innovation as a means of repairing or renegotiating this separation, what North calls a "far more radical modernity of means."〔 == Synopsis == The study is divided into three major sections. An introduction gives a brief history of the emergence of mechanically recorded media in the middle to late nineteenth century, advances in these technologies in the early twentieth century, and their formal and historical significance for modern writing of the same period. Focusing on photography, which North shows functions as a kind of "modern writing" itself, the author suggests that "perhaps the common beginning of modernism in literature and the arts is to be found in the recording technologies that brought the whole relationship of word, sound, and image into doubt."〔 Three chapters on little magazines examine in more detail debates on the artistic status of both photography and early silent film, the representational status of the new media in general, and what North terms the "crisis of sound" beginning in 1927 with the introduction of sound technologies into the silent cinema. Four chapters on individual American authors with a conclusion apply certain concepts within these debates on the new media to particular works of literature both familiar and relatively obscure in order to, as North states, "pose a significant test for the ideas proposed" in his book.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Camera Works」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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