Viewing literature: Race, gender, and moviegoing in the American imagination

This dissertation examines moviegoing as an American literary trope and assembles a constitutive body of literature about viewing from twentieth century fictional and autobiographical texts. While most existing scholarship on the relation between literature and film has concentrated on adaptations of novels into films, I look to American literature as a potential resource for reconceptualizing paradigms of spectatorship, identification, and visual pleasure within both cinema studies and literary theory.; After challenging some of the high and low cultural distinctions that traverse film and literature as dissimilar media, I round up moviegoers from the pages of American literature. Chapter One focuses on Helen Keller and Vachel Lindsay, who both sought to reinvent and legitimize their vocations by appealing to early cinema's investment in canonizing images of white femininity as mass art. Chapter Two turns to a new generation of American men of letters--Delmore Schwartz, James Agee, and James T. Farrell. Movies remained a highly personal matter and a means through which they would develop their characters, in life and in fiction, in and beyond the 1930's. Chapter Three assesses to the thematic persistence of moviegoing in African American literature. Through readings of Chester Himes's The Third Generation and Richard Wright's Native Son, I compare the ways race and sexuality get revised in relation to the silver screen. I then consider the difference feminine identity makes in reproducing the black gaze by analyzing movies' inscriptions in women's fiction, particularly Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Chapter Four considers the works of devoted cinefile James Baldwin, as acts of witnessing, a term Baldwin transposes to the movie theater, and indeed to his entire vocation as a writer, from its origins in the black church.; Cinema recurs throughout American literature as a cultural space that is either linked or in tension with religious practices, and moviegoing invariably signals a point or process of conversion. This conversion motif reveals a site at which American literature negotiates social roles that reify or challenge categories of racial, ethnic, and gendered identities. I argue that by studying these literary and filmic intersections, we can begin to view literature in ways that reflect those identities' new dimensions.