The picture of innocence: Photography and the American novel, 1892--1942 (Henry James, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee)

The Picture of Innocence traces the American novel's engagement with the representational challenges posed by photography in the first half of the twentieth century. Arguing against the critical consensus that realist texts are like photography, my dissertation suggests that modern American fiction's engagement with photography teaches us more about the reproduction and circulation of American identity and history than it does about the equivalencies between what are essentially two very different mediums. Rather than being like each other, both photography and modern American fiction are preoccupied with the problem of likeness—a problem articulated through a series of photographic metaphors. And because literature's engagement with photography is metaphorical rather than mimetic, the turn toward the photographic paradoxically results in the collapse of the relationship between vision and knowledge, rather than producing a new confidence in the visual world.; My dissertation claims that this breakdown can be seen in American fiction's exploration of photography's various claims to innocence, and it attempts to expose the motivations behind such claims. Chapter One, “The Imperial Vision of The Golden Bowl,” uncovers the many parallels between metaphors of revision and metaphors of photography in Henry James' late writings, a process crucial to understanding James' complex negotiation of the complicity between the claims for American innocence and the justification of American imperialism in the 1890s. Chapter Two, “‘Getting the Picture’: Absalom, Absalom! and the Imprint of History,” investigates the central role afforded to photographic discourse in the narrative scheme of Faulkner's novel, claiming that the text's investigation of race, visibility, and the production of history takes a photographic form. Chapter Three, “Blindness and Innocence: James Agee's Camera Eye,” reads Book Two of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men not as a failed attempt to reproduce the photographs of Book One—as so many critics have done—but instead as an investigation into the workings of language itself. Chapter Four, “Developing Race: Their Eyes Were Watching God,” suggests that Hurston's examination of the limits of photographic vision in the novel should be read as a direct engagement with the blindnesses of the 1930s photo-text.