Cinematic Imaginations: the Dialectics of Poetics and Film in American Modernism

Department of English

Julian Murphet
Julian Murphet’s research is directed at American culture since 1900, specifically to the shifting place of literature in a technologically driven and mass-media governed, capitalist social space. He has a parallel interest in world cinema history, and bases much of his current work on the claim that film and literature cannot be considered independently of one another. Julian Murphet has worked at Cambridge, Oxford and Berkeley.

The ‘Cinematic Imaginations’ project, partially funded by an ARC Discovery Project grant and based in the Department of English, is an attempt to determine many of the radical effects on literary forms and practices instigated by the invention and proliferation of cinema. The project has established a rich methodological framework for demonstrating shifts in the media ecology of America, 1900-1930, and the resultant reconfiguration of various poetic practices in their wake. Mediating between Gertrude Stein and the chronophotography of Marey and Muybridge, Ezra Pound and the cinemas of Griffith and Eisenstein, Louis Zukofsky and the ‘city symphony’ form, the project argues against mechanical ‘causality’, and for a complex web of technical mediations and transmissions that defined the ‘cinematic imagination’.

While it is a critical commonplace that the new, mechanical visual arts (especially commercial cinema) entailed wide-ranging alterations in the nature of literary art, still there exists no major contemporary statement on exactly how and why these alterations took place. My objective is to provide a sustained account of how a select group of poets reacted to the new visual media, at a conscious and ‘unconscious’ level; how the patterns and habits of literary representations were radically altered by the rapid evolution of cinematic storytelling and imaging; and how the economic fact of ‘Hollywood’ sent shockwaves through the literary establishment and institutions.

The critical task of my project is to assimilate the latest lessons of cultural theory, and think through them back to the inaugural moment of the real crisis within the American ‘media ecology’: the dawn and rise of cinema. What matters most is to use this as a substantive reappraisal of literary study itself, insofar as it concerns the twentieth century. Only by demonstrating that twentieth-century literature is unthinkable and indeed unreadable without a prior appraisal of the role of cinema in its very conditions of possibility, will the residual formalism of literary studies be surmounted. More concretely, by making this necessary advance on the terrain, I hope to generate questions, suggest a methodology and offer a series of case studies, which will help initiate that vital procedure. The question of literature’s place in a ‘media ecology’ has only become more urgent and complex in the new century; a backward glance is the surest means of analysing our prehistory and orienting ourselves properly towards questions that have not been asked for too long.

Literature and Visual Technologies edited with Lydia Rainford (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003).