Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film [Paperback]

Susan McCabe (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521114837 | ISBN-13: 978-0521114837 | Publication Date: June 25, 2009 | Edition: 1

Susan McCabe juxtaposes the work of four American modernist poets with the techniques and themes of early twentieth-century European avant-garde films. The historical experience of World War One and its aftermath of broken and shocked bodies shaped a preoccupation with fragmentation in both film and literature. Film, montage and camera work provided poets with a vocabulary through which to explore and refashion modern physical and metaphoric categories of the body, including the hysteric, automaton, bisexual and femme fatale. This innovative study explores the impact of new cinematic modes of representation on the poetry of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Cinematic Modernism links the study of literary forms with film studies, visual culture, gender studies and psychoanalysis to expand the usual parameters of literary modernism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[An] ambitious, innovative study ... [with] bold juxtapositions of ideas.... McCabe's linkages are precise, original, and bibliographically extensive. Her network of inquiry discovers connective neurons from modernist poems and film scenarios to psychological, literary and film theories of past and recent publication. She proves the range of "cinematic modernism" to be wide, deep, and generative."
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

Book Description

Susan McCabe juxtaposes modernist poetry with the techniques and themes of early twentieth-century European avant-garde films. Cinematic Modernism explores the impact of new cinematic modes of representation on Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Marianne Moore, and uses insights from literary criticism, film studies, gender studies and psychoanalysis.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (June 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521114837
• ISBN-13: 978-0521114837
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Silent Films Speaks The Language of Poetry, December 8, 2005

By 

Kate M. Chandler (Santa Moncia, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Hardcover)

This exciting book explains so much about how we think and feel, see and hear. It articules the mysterious relationship between the most precise language, poetry, and silent films, pure image. It makes thrilling original and provoking connections between them which lie in the mechanisms of bodies, the poets', the films' and our own, their lost control, hysteria, automationism, and sexuality. We see Chaplin and Stein, Williams and the Surrealist films of Bunel and others, H.D. and her film Borderline as well as Marianne Moore and the documentary films in a new light. The poet's body and the film's body inform each in both techniquie and the cutting/editing upon the body. A great book that looks at reading film, poetry and reality in a groundbreaking way.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Perspective on Film and Poetry, April 13, 2011

By 

Spencer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Hardcover)

I think this is one of the first books to really link the practices of avant-garde silent film as well as popular cinema to specific modern poets, and their very particular aesthetic goals. In this way this book is an intervention in the field, and I can never read a poem the same anymore--modern or otherwise.
I recommend this to anyone who wants to really understand the period of modernism as well as some of its more inscrutable as well as disappearing figures.....