|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Marcy DiniusAssistant Professor The Camera and the Pen: American Literature in the Daguerreian Age (in process)This project explores the fundamental interdependence of antebellum literature and print culture and the earliest stage of photography. In doing so, The Camera and the Pen illustrates how the relationships between representation and reality, and aesthetics and politics, were negotiated through this unprecedented means of seeing, mediating, and capturing the world. The archive for this study includes popular periodicals, trade journals, and essays on daguerreotypy by T. S. Arthur, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fanny Fern, Edgar Allan Poe, and N. P. Willis. These texts inform new readings of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Melville’s Pierre, and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—three antebellum novels which engage critically with daguerreian representation. The Camera and the Pen contributes to the study of American literature, culture, and media by analyzing vital transactions between photography and literature in the development of national artistic traditions. It also offers a new theory of word-image relations in a specific, and understudied, material context.
Current Research I am also developing a comparative study of nineteenth century American fiction and twentieth century film that extends my interest in the relationship of word and image into the age of the motion picture, as well as a book-length project on African-American radical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter, once again, is interested in political and aesthetic issues of representation and mediation—in this case, considering African-American written and spoken expressions of anger, pain, joy, violence, and liberation. I have taught undergraduate courses on both of these topics and look forward to working through relevant critical and theoretical readings with students in their graduate-level incarnations.Essays from my research and teaching are forthcoming in ESQ, Poe Studies, the Modern Language Association volume Approaches to Teaching Poe's Poetry and Prose, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. |
|||||||||||||||
|
