Abstract: This book discusses the impact of mechanical recording on modern art and literature. Recording media, including photography and film, seemed to offer entirely new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, with both the usefulness of writing and the immediacy of sight. In particular, this book traces some of the more utopian projects to arise from this hope, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the transatlantic avant garde is traced through three stages, from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, experienced with particular bitterness by the editors of the early film magazine, Close Up. Subsequent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls spectroscopic gayety — the enjoyable disorientation of the senses by machine perception — turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction, even that commonly celebrated for its hard-nosed realism. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its inevitable limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway.

Keywords: writing, Readie machine, Bob Brown, Eurgene Jolas, spectroscopic gayety, modern poetry, modern art, modern literature, fiction, new media