The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (review)

The Eye's Mind is a study of literary modernism that we have needed for a long while. Our post-structuralist obsession with visuality is everywhere apparent; but it has taken a scholar with Karen Jacobs's deep learning and range of knowledge to help us understand how our contemporary critique of ocular epistemology relates to the rise of a particular kind of visual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. She is able to do this, and to do this so well, because her study is genuinely interdisciplinary; its primary strength lies precisely in its synthetic and comparativist aims. Jacobs knows as much about photography as she does about literature; as much about French existentialism as American anthropology. Although almost every sentence of this study is theoretically inflected, she never lets theory do her thinking for her. On the contrary, her references to Baudrillard, Benjamin, Marx, Jameson, Eagleton, and Zizek provide the conceptual grid through which she performs her own specific analysis of modernist visual discourse. And her literary choices demonstrate the far-reaching explanatory power of her cultural investigation: this is a book where Henry James and Zora Neale Hurston can actually be located together [End Page 538] on a modernist map; where Lolita and Invisible Man inhabit the same American landscape; and where local village theatre in Virginia Woolf is only a step away from Nathaniel West's Hollywood.