Reading in the Age of Edison: The Cinematicity of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’
Reading in the Age of Edison: The Cinematicity of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’
This chapter, written by Karin Littau, addresses the media-transitional period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to show how aestho-physiological experiments in reading were linked to a variety of motion picture technologies. On the one hand such technologies were used to measure reading speeds; on the other, they profoundly affected how readers began to perceive the printed word: no longer as static marks on the page but giving ‘the impression of movement’, which in turn was conceived ‘in proportion’ to how it ‘moved’ the reader. By focusing on experiments by Vernon Lee, Gertrude Stein, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and her story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (itself an experiment in phantasmagoric reading), Littau shows how reading during this period bore the traces of cinematicity; to the extent that in the 1930s ‘movie-minded’ writers like Robert Carlton Brown proposed ‘reading machines’, which would bring outmoded reading practices into line with modern cinema-viewing.
Keywords: Vernon Lee, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, History of reading, Comparative media, Film and Literature
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