"The Making of Presence through Sensations and Illusions: 'Picturization' in Photoplay Novels" with Marija Dalbello
February 22, 2016
The next meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2015-2016 series will take place on Friday, March 4th, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in the Rosenwald Room (LJ 205), 2nd floor, Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.
Abstract
Beyond its historical reference to silent film era, the expression "photo-play" contextualizes photographic image as "play" in its association to dramatic activity and movement of (a photographic) mechanism. This talk will focus on photoplay novels, a genre of fiction that featured stills from silent films. The novels appear concurrently with the first attempts of filmmaking at the end of the nineteenth century but most of them were published in the period following 1912 and peaking in the mid-1920s, just before the introduction of sound film. A complex relationship between the text and the photographic still is just one of the levels at which the two systems of circulation of texts and images were brought together by publishers specializing in reprint editions of copyrighted fiction in publishers' cloth trade editions. They created an interstitial reception space. I will explore the narrativity of photoplays as text-images (after W.J.T. Mitchell) and photoplays as a node of an inter-textual situation at the time of the restructuring of the media. The publishers' trade editions were the dominant cultural objects engaging certain forms of reading. The placement of photographic stills in the novel as ways of evoking presence introduces uncertainty of a realistic medium in a text that relies on eidetic image. The oppositions of the text of fictionalized narrative and the moving image (photographic print) will be read against prefatory material, blurbs, and advertisements that defined the contemporary imperatives for seeing and reading and the technologies of presence and "picturization" that enmeshed the studio, the film, and the text itself.
About Marija Dalbello
Marija Dalbello is an associate professor of information science in the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. Her current research, teaching and publications focus on visual genres and visual epistemologies, the history of knowledge and history of the book. She co-edited Print Culture in Croatia: The Canon and the Borderlands (2006) with Tinka Katic; Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings (2011) with Mary Shaw, and A History of Modern Librarianship: Constructing the Heritage of Western Cultures with Wayne Wiegand and Pamela Spence Richards (2015). She is writing a book on the ceremonies of information in the Habsburg sphere. She is editing 1893 Around the World: Transnational Modernisms with Sarah Wadsworth. She co-directed the Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book 2006-2012.
Location / Directions
The Jefferson Building is located between First and Second Streets, SE in the District of Columbia. Nearest metro stops are Capitol South (blue and orange lines) and Union Station (red line). For further information, consult the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies website at http://wagpcs.wordpress.com/, or contact Sabrina Baron and Eleanor Shevlin at washagpcs "AT" umd.edu.