Book contents
- Technology and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Technology and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Timeline
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Developments
- Chapter 8 Prostheses
- Chapter 9 Clocks
- Chapter 10 Compasses
- Chapter 11 Telescopes
- Chapter 12 Steam Engines
- Chapter 13 Wires
- Chapter 14 Cameras
- Chapter 15 Phonographs
- Chapter 16 Waves and Rays
- Chapter 17 The Bomb
- Chapter 18 Networks
- Part III Applications
- Index
Chapter 14 - Cameras
from Part II - Developments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 November 2023
- Technology and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Technology and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Timeline
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Developments
- Chapter 8 Prostheses
- Chapter 9 Clocks
- Chapter 10 Compasses
- Chapter 11 Telescopes
- Chapter 12 Steam Engines
- Chapter 13 Wires
- Chapter 14 Cameras
- Chapter 15 Phonographs
- Chapter 16 Waves and Rays
- Chapter 17 The Bomb
- Chapter 18 Networks
- Part III Applications
- Index
Summary
This chapter takes up the literary reverberations of two types of photography – still and moving – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The invention and popularization of still photography in the nineteenth century posed a challenge to all existing forms of representation, visual or otherwise: Whereas earlier forms offered necessarily imperfect, inexact, and approximate renderings of depicted subjects, the detached “camera eye” promised total transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. With the invention of silent film and, later, talkies, the camera extended its dominion of objective representation into further dimensions and modalities. Carver reads work by William Empson, William James, W. H. Auden and others to argue that cameras served “not only to make the visible world familiar, as early inventors hoped they might do, but also to make it strange.”
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- Technology and Literature , pp. 269 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023