A Familiar Strangeness

A Familiar Strangeness

Author: Stuart Burrows

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0820335215

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Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which is believed to imitate the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography's influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render American identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. The camera, according to Burrows, provoked a representational crisis, one broadly modernist in character. Since the photograph is not only a copy of its subject but a physical product of it, the camera can be seen as actually challenging mimetic or realistic theories of representation, which depend on a recognizable gap between original and reproduction. Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera-including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. The photographic metaphors and allusions to the medium that appear throughout these writers' work demonstrate the ways in which one representational form actually influences another--by changing how artists conceive of identity, history, and art itself. A Familiar Strangeness thus challenges the notion of an absolute break between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism, a break that typically centers precisely on the two movements' supposedly differing relation to the camera. Just as modernist fiction interrupts and questions the link between visuality and knowledge, so American realist fiction can be understood as making the world less knowable precisely by making it more visible.


A Familiar Strangeness

A Familiar Strangeness

Author: Stuart Burrows

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-05-31

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0820337412

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Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which is believed to imitate the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography's influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render American identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. The camera, according to Burrows, provoked a representational crisis, one broadly modernist in character. Since the photograph is not only a copy of its subject but a physical product of it, the camera can be seen as actually challenging mimetic or realistic theories of representation, which depend on a recognizable gap between original and reproduction. Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera-including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. The photographic metaphors and allusions to the medium that appear throughout these writers' work demonstrate the ways in which one representational form actually influences another--by changing how artists conceive of identity, history, and art itself. A Familiar Strangeness thus challenges the notion of an absolute break between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism, a break that typically centers precisely on the two movements' supposedly differing relation to the camera. Just as modernist fiction interrupts and questions the link between visuality and knowledge, so American realist fiction can be understood as making the world less knowable precisely by making it more visible.


Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780252017780

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Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930's, journeys from being a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance.


The Bride of the Innisfallen

The Bride of the Innisfallen

Author: Eudora Welty

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2012-08-29

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0544105516

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A collection of short stories from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of classic American southern literature. Combining stories set in the rural south, Eudora Welty’s own special province, and stories with a European locale, which give a wider range to her fiction, The Bride of Innisfallen demonstrates the remarkable talent of one of the finest short story writers of our time. The gentle wit of the title story, the grave and musical prose of “Circe,” a retelling of Greek myth, the acute character portrayal and extraordinary evocation of the steamy bayou county in “No Place for You, My Love” are all touched with the particular magic that has made Welty one of America’s most beloved storytellers. “The writing throughout is at Ms. Welty’s best level.” —Edward Weeks, The Atlantic


Aliens in America

Aliens in America

Author: Jodi Dean

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780801484681

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Discusses the social and political implications of widespread belief in unidentified flying objects, extraterrestrials, and government cover-ups, and considers what they reveal in a culture of mass media and conflicting evidence.


Making the Familiar Strange

Making the Familiar Strange

Author: Ryan Gunderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1000191125

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This book examines the meaning and implications of the sociological maxim, ‘make the familiar strange’. Addressing the methodological questions of why and how sociologists should make the familiar strange, what it means to ‘make the familiar strange’, and how this approach benefits sociological research and theory, it draws on four central concepts: reification, familiarity, strangeness, and defamiliarization. Through a typology of the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification, the author argues that the primary barrier to sociological knowledge is our experience of the social world as fixed and unchangeable. Thus emerges the importance of constituting the familiar as the strange through a process of social defamiliarization as well as making this process more methodical by reflecting on heuristics and patterns of thinking that render society strange. The first concerted effort to examine an important feature of the sociological imagination, this volume will appeal to sociologists of any specialty and theoretical persuasion.