Customer Reviews

Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism

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Can the first reviewer seem more jealous and heated about the fact that his academic career has met its demise some time ago? It's ok, just try again. Hey, anything is possible. Why dont you meet Professor Armstrong beforee being so rude. Get out of your cloud of mediocrity. Read this book!

"Here is intellectual leadership at its best" gushes Rey Chow, a cronie of Nancy Armstrong's, in her intemperate review of Armstrong's minor monograph on photography and realism. Chow seems to suggest that this is not just another tenure-grabbing piece of academic fluff, but, rather, that Armstrong has altered the world forever: "By foregrounding visuality, she radically reconceptualizes the relationship between realism and the modern, bringing about a paradigm shift with which scholars will have to reckon in the decades to come." Whoa, Rey! Let's not get carried away paying back Armstrong for her good reviews of your work! Chow's inflated rhetoric leads one to believe that we've entered an entirely new dimension of experience, a new understanding of the world that will leave us all dumbfounded and amazed by the newness of a once puzzling universe. She seems to think that a new revelation has been lowered from Heaven to cast light upon a previously murky world, and the notion that photography has flooded modern consciousness and the modern novel is somehow startling in its implications. "As much a model of critical imagination as it is of scholarly integrity, this book accomplishes what only the rarest of books do: it teaches you how to think." The ultimate scratching of the academic back: thanks for forming my brain, Nancy. Before reading this book I was ignorant. Now I can think. Cheers. Ah, yes -- by using the now hoary marxist-feminist device of concentrating on the controlling gaze of the viewer ("visuality"), by insisting on the material realm (even if only as "the real") in contrast to the spiritual realm, by tossing around a few of the usual post-structuralist devices of distancing the object and reconstituting it within a new context, she garners the acolades of her cronies as the Great Remaker of Modern Thought. Wow! This book is, in essence, more a testimony to the nature of contemporary academic politics and buddy systems than it is to anything else, and all of the praise heaped upon it cannot change the fact that it will have only as much influence as a few professors can wring out of it in their seminars. Good luck, people.