Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf - by Marit Grøtta (Paperback)

About the Book

Considers the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs for three modernist writers

Book Synopsis

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers' ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

Review Quotes

One of the strengths of the book is Grøtta's expansive articulation of the different ways that photographs were interwoven into daily life... Reading Portrait Photographs shows an impressive depth of research... Grøtta's book is rich and insightful on Proust, Kafka, and Woolf, on the historical moment of modernism, and on our own relationship to mediated faces.--Maury Bruhn, University of Alabama at Birmingham "Configurations"

Marit Grøtta makes us see how Proust, Kafka and Woolf read faces mediated by photography and revealing truth, power and sympathy in this wonderful new physiognomy of modernism.

--Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

This illuminating reading of portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf offers both a probingly fresh understanding of modernism and a genealogy of our face-infested moment and scrambled private-public boundaries.

--John Durham Peters, Yale University