Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion

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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 Grtta 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.

Reviews

Marit Grtta 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.

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.

Author Bio

Marit Grotta is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flaneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and a number of articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Queneau and Agamben. Her research interests are nineteenth-century and modernist literature, visual culture, media philosophy and aesthetic theory.