Capturing character

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 phot