on Glancing Visions

Courtney Murray (CM): We usually like to know where this project began for you. However, I want to start in the middle of your journey while you're writing the book. I read your acknowledgments, and you state at the end that you wrote this book without any time off from teaching. That really caught my attention. Can you speak to how teaching shaped your book-writing process? How were you able to steal away time, and did this impact your concept of the “glance” at all?

Zachary Tavlin (ZT): I’ll say a couple of things. This book was a dissertation project and then a first book project. I did spend some time off teaching as a graduate student. I had a year where I was working as the assistant editor of a journal, and I had a very small writing fellowship. However, since leaving and moving to Chicago and starting a job here, I have had no time off teaching. Some faculty, of course, have a semester or a year off. That was what I was thinking about when I wrote that in the acknowledgments. There are a lot of people writing books in that type of position.

I tend not to teach the thing I’m working on. I know a lot of people do, especially in graduate seminars, and I totally get the advantage of that. It makes practical sense. We all hopefully teach things that we love, but it’s a tendency of mine, if I’m obsessed with a topic, to be so ingrained in it that it actually becomes very difficult to teach. More difficult to communicate informally than things that you like, or even love, but that you’re not laser-focused on and deep in the weeds. I taught a course on Emily Dickinson. And I do teach American literature broadly, sometimes in a survey class or in courses on poetics or the novel. There, I may touch on what I’m writing about, but I don’t teach the topic as such. 

So, I never taught a class on the “glance” or the “gaze” or anything like that. I also teach film studies on the side. Of course, that’s one of the places where gaze theory comes in, through Laura Mulvey and psychoanalysis—the most influential version of “gaze theory” really emerges via film theory. But: teaching at an art school is a somewhat unique thing. Most of our students are visual artists—painters, sculptors, performance artists, and students of fashion and design. So, that inevitably generates discussions about visuality, even when I’m teaching literature or intellectual history.

I like to figure out where the levers are for getting students interested, many of whom may know nothing about literature or very little beyond having studied it in high school. They’re in studios; they’re painting, and they have a vocabulary to work with, but usually a very conceptual vocabulary. So, trying to figure out where the study of literary forms or genres can touch, if not completely overlap, with that work does help. I would say that did help with the book, constantly thinking about the connections between visual art or media and literature, though not always in immediate or direct ways.

CM: Thank you! Do you want to speak a little bit more about that writing process from dissertation to book?

ZT: Yes, there are many different ways to write a dissertation. Some are more book-like than others, some more like a collection of essays on a topic. There are those with a literature review followed up by a series of examples. Then, there are the emerging alternative dissertation forms, which I did not explore.

In my case, I tried to write it like it was a book from the beginning, which doesn’t mean it was initially a good one. You’re pushed to give an extensive literature review in the introduction, for instance—things that, when you start to work with readers and editors, acquisition editors, they want you to get rid of or significantly abbreviate. They want to make sure that you are threading your argument throughout by looking back to earlier chapters and looking forward in ways that a dissertation might not do, which I was always a bit allergic to. I like to write in a more impressionistic way than I think some editors prefer. They like a lot of signposting. They like a lot of “this is my argument.” They like a lot of thesis, and we might teach our students the very same principles. But I resisted all that, just a little bit. 

During the dissertation, your advisors have a lot of power over you, so to speak. I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily, but they do. They have a lot of power in terms of how they shape what you want to do, what they think you want to do, and what they think you should do. I'll also say, and this is just a practical thing, that I tended to work with older faculty and later career faculty. I did that as a graduate student in philosophy and literature. There are good and bad things about that. The bad thing about it is they're so far off the job market that their advice is not always current. I did it because I wanted to be somewhat insulated from that. It also allowed me to do things in a way that didn't feel so overdetermined by exactly what the discourse was either in my cohort or in literary studies during 2016-17 and 2018 when I was writing. 

Then,  when I got to the book, my editor told me to just drop all of the things that I felt like I owed my advisor (who, I should say, was terrific and not too pushy). Your dissertation is what they wanted. There will be times in your dissertation when you feel like you can’t go in a certain direction because your advisor is pushing you in another direction. Getting to the book phase is a place where you can actually think about what you really want to write, having just gone through a gauntlet. For the book, you have readers who are not your advisors, and they might come at things from very different places. They will come to you with their own appraisals of the project, and you will feel a bit of responsibility to them. So, you’re substituting people sometimes who have very different intellectual commitments. For me, it wasn’t so much that I had to completely reshape the dissertation. There was a liberatory moment where I felt I could put aside a few things that I felt I owed someone. If there was a theorist you cut out somewhere along the line and that made you sad, you can pull them back in. Those are really fun times early in the process.

Mary Bradford (MB): In your introduction, you do something very common in dissertations: set up the theory. Then, you have a numerical  list that defines the “glance.” However, your chapters themselves meander brilliantly and gracefully through the possibilities of the “glance” without following that list. Was the list from the dissertation?

ZT: No, actually. I don’t think the list was in the dissertation, or at least I don’t remember if it was. One thing I absolutely do remember is that I initially had that list at the very end of the introduction. At some point in the reader’s report process, someone really urged me to bring it up front. They were like, “Oh, this is great,” it lays out some of the phenomenological facts underlying your project. I had no problem with moving it up. And the list doesn’t come back in the chapters. 

For example, the first one is, “Glances connect the eye to the rest of the body.” This isn’t a structuring principle of the book. If it were, it probably would have had to come at the end of the introduction because the chapter breakdowns give you at least a paragraph explaining what each chapter does. The list is just an extended definition of the “glance,” and some readers liked having it handy.

But I see your point that there’s a tension between the schema and what, in my book, is not overly schematic. Some schema is important. That’s true of most books in literary studies, especially because literature sometimes doesn’t click in with schema as easily as other disciplinary objects.

MB: As you wrote the book, were you becoming more aware of your audience? And was that perhaps why you were trying to give them some schema?

ZT: Yeah, when you’re in the book phase versus the dissertation phase, assuming it’s the same project, you do think more about audience. Actually, you think both more and less about audience. In the dissertation phase, you really know who your audience is. It’s, say, three people. You can’t push back too much, but you know what they’re looking for and what impresses them. You know what they value, and you’re hyper-focused on them. You don’t necessarily even think of them as a traditional audience. What you’re doing is often closer to a phone conversation, more intimate than writing for a public usually is.

Then, with the book, you think more about audience in the vaguer ways. When you’re pitching the book, you have to tell your editor who your audiences are. I don’t remember exactly who I thought they would be, but I probably said something like nineteenth-century American literary scholars first, then people who study visual culture and art, and scholars of phenomenology and intellectual history. Maybe they would be interested in this book. As you go, it gets more and more diffuse. You know that a decent number of nineteenth-century literary scholars, especially the ones who study the authors you’re focusing on, will probably read the book. Maybe some art historians might pick it up and find some interest if there happens to be some adjacency with their primary interests. Philosophers who are interested in phenomenology and theories of subjectivity might also be interested. So, you focus on the audience you know, and you accept that the rest is collateral. I found that there were many more nooks I wanted to explore but that I had to turn back to keep the book from speaking to too many people (and risking speaking to no one).

As far as why you would schematize, there’s just more pressure on making sure there’s an audience for the book because that’s why the editors pick up the project in the first place. They believe there’s a market for it; even with university presses, there’s still that monetary pressure. A lot of people read the introduction to get a sense of your thesis. For a book that isn’t as thesis-driven as mine, there’s still a need to produce some kind of schema or thesis. This, you say, is where my book departs from the status quo in the field.

Sometimes, the introduction is the only thing that people read. Not every scholar of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dickinson, or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper will read the whole book. Hopefully, you’ll get people to read the whole thing, but then you’ll also get the sub-audience (larger in number, if not attentiveness) that just looks for the thesis to stock away. I can’t tell you whether I’ve successfully communicated to that audience because I wasn’t thinking about them as much as I could (or should) have, but there are moments in the introduction where the significance of my intervention might come through clearly enough.

CM: I have a follow-up. What Mary and I both really liked was your introduction. It read differently. Your language wasn’t necessarily casual or conversational, but to us, there was a presence of you as a person engaging with these scholars and topics, not just as a scholar yourself but as a reader, as someone who came to this topic through a series of experiences. It was like you were taking us through those experiences that helped you get to the term “glance.” Was that a welcomed change from the dissertation, or was that already in it? 

ZT: It was a bit of a change. I think there’s pressure as a graduate student dissertating to avoid that, for the most part, as part of performing one’s professionalization. You have to be a scholar, right? And what that means is a bit restrictive. Auto-theory, for instance, or critical memoir, has grown in popularity. But my book is not either of those, and they weren’t something I felt I wanted to do or could do. 

But what I think you’re noticing is an attempt to demonstrate coming to a topic and to an argument without pretending that it all came upon you at once. You’ve just absorbed all this work, and now it’s there in one timeless capsule that you can put back on paper. In the book stage, You have a little more permission to restylize and rethink your rhetoric. Whereas in the dissertation, you might want to play the part, for your committee, of a disembodied, impersonal apprehender of the literature. I would say that having an honest think about what kind of style you want to produce, either while you’re writing it or before you pitch, is necessary. The book can appear to do something interesting and new through its thesis and style. There’s a risk in that. Some people are going to read it and think it’s a bit overdone, or some people are going to read it and think, “I prefer the appearance of a mind that’s not processing as it goes.” 

The introduction did change quite a bit in terms of the style. I liked having short sections in the introduction, to mimic a glancing movement between materials. That was something that was less apparent in the dissertation’s introduction. That’s what I think is fun about the book—restylizing and rethinking form.

MB: I want to ask the style question, which I’m sure you’ve gotten. In each of the chapters, you have literary pairings with visual art, either paintings, daguerreotypes, or photographs. How did you choose these pairings? Were they present in your dissertation? How did you expect an audience to react to this movement from literary to visual art?

ZT: There are a couple of ways to think about pairings. One is that you have a solid structural architecture where each chapter is one novel or one cluster of poems and one visual artwork. That’s not what I was doing, so it isn’t really a pairing in the strong sense, like here’s a chapter on Hawthorne and a work of art he saw. To me, there was something more organic about how those texts met and interacted. When I was writing the dissertation and probably early on in the book process, I was reading both the American nineteenth-century and general Americanist literary scholarship as well as a lot of literature. I came to literature from a philosophical angle, so there’s some (for instance) phenomenology and psychoanalysis. That was all part of my background as a scholar. Then, I read art history, which I’m not trained in but always had an interest in. So, I did a lot of reading on visual theory, and I found examples that I wasn’t initially looking for.

For instance, in the Henry James chapter, I spend a bit of time on an Édouard Manet painting. There was some historical overlap. There is a thing that scholars do where they make a big deal out of coincidences—“look, they were written and painted in the same year”—which I try to get away from, or at least not hang too much on. I hope instead to encounter work that is fascinating enough that it helps me think about this other thing. It works the way metaphors or analogies work. Like, first, how was James writing about the Impressionists? From the beginning of his career, he was an art critic. He made a decent amount of his money writing these articles. Here, you find a concept that refers to a unit of experience, both mundane and aesthetic: the impression. I started to dig into that and followed several tracks down how James was thinking about visuality. He didn’t do it primarily (at least not at first) in a direct appraisal of his own work or even to better understand novels he admired (like George Eliot’s);  there was more of a remove and even a rivalry in his thoughts on art. It allowed him to kind of think about literary form obliquely because it routed through another medium. You start to make your own connections from those junctures.

Another way of pairing is through archives. You can bounce discoveries off each other creatively without wading too far into art historical debates you don’t want to get into. You have to put those boundaries up and find ways to make connections work on the sentence level. There’s no stop-in-your-tracks archival discovery in my book. That just wasn’t the stance I took toward my primary objects. I spent a little bit of time in photographic archives during the dissertation process, and I spent some time with the Dickinson materials. But that’s it.

I just found things that I was interested in, without worrying too much (at first) about who else it interested. It’s enough to discover and read James’s novels and fictions along with his art criticism. What was he thinking about? What might he have seen? How does this play into what I was seeing as the development of his career? Most of the chapters are developmental in this way. The Dickinson, James, and Hawthorne chapters all have a sense of the development of a career. What were their preoccupations, and how did they change? Sometimes, you can tell a story about another medium that goes along with that development. The development of their art and feelings for new literary forms parallel some other historical developments in art, social history, or epistemology. Those are just facts; what you make of them (and whether what you make of them is convincing and surprising) is the core of the work.

CM: That actually turns to my question about the canon. You bring it up in your introduction. There’s this urgency or anxiety about being too involved with the canon. You need originality and argument. What were some of the challenges and joys you experienced while writing about such canonical authors, and how did these authors and the “glance” challenge you to think about originality and intervention, if that was a concern for you?

ZT: I think you can see a little bit of that concern, what you’re calling anxiety, in the introduction because there is a pressure to get away from canonical authors. An ethical command to decenter the canon. I don’t really care about the “canon” conceived as a box of things that’s always there and that we endlessly shuffle authors in and out of. There are still strong feelings circulating around that model, but I don’t have an attachment to the concept. 

I did have what I felt was a necessary, unavoidable attachment to something we might call “canonicity,” which is less about the canon as an object and more about the attention scholars and readers give to the project of constructing one. So, part of my argument is that this study required a renewed attention to “canon.” I was particularly interested in writers who have many decades of serious criticism behind them, like Dickinson and James. There’s an understandable pressure to reinterpret their work from feminist, queer, and critical race perspectives. We want to study them. These writers are important to us. We think we have a lot to say about them. But we want to shift so that we can do it while still keeping that ethical prerogative intact. And be current, sell books, and market our careers (not everyone is so cynical, to be sure; my point is that there are many reasons to feel hemmed in when writing about someone like Henry James).

So, despite all of those shifts and the way political readings of these authors have moved, it’s important for my argument to see what hasn’t changed. For instance, in terms of the gaze, it is usually used as a concept of power, linked especially to apprehension, conceptuality, and so forth. Things that aren’t necessarily about vision at all. Gaze has become a word for what’s in your purview, about how we frame things, what power relationships inhere. Even with all the anti-canonical pressures, or maybe because of them, some things have become still more unconsciously pervasive in our readings. That’s important to my argument. So, I couldn’t get away from “canonical” authors. If this book makes any small intervention into the field, there could be related studies of so-called less canonical authors to follow. 

In other words, there had to be that first reckoning with what I would call canonical concepts in American literary studies. The canon isn’t just about the authors. It’s also about our habits as scholars. Discovering or promoting a less-read author is a very valuable project in a different type of study. In my case, it didn’t really make sense. And I don’t feel one should be embarrassed to care deeply about writers who’ve been written about a lot already. You have to think about how you can articulate and clarify your commitments. Should we ultimately only read a relatively small number of writers in the massive collection of unread stuff out there? I don’t know, and I don’t know if our profession is designed to do otherwise except in rare instances.

CM: What I’m hearing from you is that you know the authors you turn to are the clearest, most direct examples of what you’re trying to show. I think that’s the best way to use the “canon.” If it’s showing up in the major authors’ works, it’s definitely something that needs a little more study in lesser-known texts. Changing the reading lens helps you still bring something new to these canonical authors. There’s still so much to glean from these authors, even if they are considered well-researched or studied.

ZT: Yeah. And, when you see the same old stuff or find that scholarship on an author and their work is in a rut, that's just as important to think about and to deal with as the initiation of another author into critical conversation. They’re both important and always will be. One practical question is, “How do I say something interesting and revealing about someone or something that’s been written about so much?” Another is, “What do I do when I find someone or something where there’s very little extant work to go on?” And, sometimes, writing becomes very descriptive because you have to simply tell people what it is you have found or are looking at. You have to tell them what it is and construct an unfamiliar context before you can give a close reading of it. This is totally valuable; someone has to do it. But is that what you want to do? Setting a conversation in motion is different than joining one. How do you want to spend your energy and labor time? And what do you think you’re best at? 

MB: Thanks! As well as the rut we get into with the texts that we use, we also get into a rut in terms of the politics coming from the field. You talk about this quite a bit with respect to the “gaze.” There’s this sense in American Studies where we get stuck in this understanding of the “gaze” as a colonizing force and as something proprietary. So, when you theorize the “glance,” you’re pushing back against this politics; but, at the same time, I know the “glance” is something that seems almost ephemeral or hard to pin down. What is its politics? Do you see the “glance’s” politics as standing in opposition to that of the “gaze?”

ZT: Yeah, that’s a difficult question because, I would claim, neither has an inherent politics. I try to make a distinction between the phenomenological structure of the “glance” and of the “gaze,” which I don’t think comes readymade with a politics, and the concept of the “glance” and of the “gaze,” which can and–especially in the case of the “gaze”–has accumulated political attachments. 

The “gaze” is something we can’t avoid talking about when we’re doing this kind of visual-theoretical and critical analysis. But I try to use the word gaze in this book as if it were put under erasure. It is there to be emptied out of some of the overriding assumptions—not just political but conceptual—that we have built into it. I don’t think that most contemporary analyses of American imperial and settler-colonial politics can be productively summarized by the “gaze” when it comes to representations of figures in paintings or literature.  American Studies has become so overly attached to it that it becomes difficult to discern the next steps of that anti-colonial trigonometry. There’s an unconscious ideological framework corralling ostensibly liberatory critique. The repetitiousness of the gaze is ubiquitous but rarely remarked upon because it’s so present that it comes to mirror our own desires. It becomes our way of seeing everything, even as it’s cast in the role of villain or vice.

I think one thing scholars do right, even when ethically committed to uncovering the extent of injustice in the American nineteenth century, is reinterrogating our concepts and rethinking them when and where they have stopped moving. When something stops moving, you have to ask, why? What is being ignored or repressed by our definitions? Where can we find elbow room for a broader dialectical look at what a concept is grasping and missing, both as it applies to something at work in nineteenth-century literature and in our current scholarly discourse?

The “gaze” or “the glance,” as phenomenological events, are not inherently political, but they can congeal into politics because they’re social. They’re social in the sense that the “glance,” for instance, is something that borrows images rather than possesses them. On the one hand, that’s just how we see things, but once conceptualized, it is open to political meaning, and once it gets metabolized by poetry or fiction as a dynamic form, as a force for visual art, it enters the realm of representation (which also means, at least minimally, separation). Then, a politics where phenomenology once appears, not always an explicit message, not as a sermon, but as a form. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to say, for example, “Okay, there’s a politics of the ‘glance’ that we can summarize and it’s all about ecological distribution.” There’s nothing about the “glance” that’s inherently non-human, just as there’s nothing about the “glance” that’s inherently political. There certainly has become a politics of the “gaze” in our critical analysis and in the culture at large. The word gaze now means power before it means a way of looking (the latter an assistant to the former).

In the Harper chapter, I try to back up the claim that there’s nothing inherently damaging or liberatory about gazing and glancing. In the case of genre paintings of enslaved people or slave auctions, we often see as an interplay of sightlines the opposition between sentimental gazes and the slave trader’s gaze, looks of emotional sympathy, and cold commodification. Harper does something a little bit more complicated in the style and form of her lyrics. In a lot of these scenes, which we find famous versions of in Uncle Tom's Cabin, looking deep into the eye of the other allows one to immediately apprehend their feelings and the beating of their heart. This is a logic of what some might call the “gaze.” You bring something of someone else back; you enclose it appreciatively in confident apprehension of who the other is in the encounter. And that, critics of sentimentalism argue, is the greatest of liberal illusions.

At the same time, there’s nothing inherently good about the “glance.” It does do certain things well. When we glance, we skate over things, we let things go, we drop things back into their place. In the Dickinson chapter, I reference a famous poem whose final line includes the phrase, “plashless as they swim.” Plashlessness is a negative figure for the way bodies and glances–in the poem, she is referring to butterflies–make infinitesimally small marks on the world around them. Like a splash in the water, where the surface almost immediately smoothes itself back out. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on what you are trying to do, I suppose. That’s just how glances work, and sometimes that subtlety is helpful, and sometimes it isn’t. Glances are embodied, adaptive,  subtle, and distributed. The next question we might ask is how putting glances in motion establishes sociality, intimacy, and a relationship between the human body and its surroundings or between any organism and its social, ecological niche. 

Rather than assuming ahead of time that the “glance is good and the gaze is bad” or “the gaze is about domination while the glance is about living with humility,” I wanted to turn those propositions into questions guiding the analysis. There are a lot of studies that immediately set up their own answers and work backward to the appropriate questions, but I tried to avoid that as much as possible. I aimed to test out the “glance” as a tool for criticism. 

CM: I want to go back to the Harper chapter because what I found very interesting is that you connect Harper’s “glancing lyricism” to Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” I’m not a Harper scholar, but I have read enough of Harper to notice that she is really attuned throughout her poetry to Black women’s lived experiences, their children, and their flesh. But Du Bois, especially in his earlier work, is really concerned about Black masculinity and its interiority. How does the “glance” help connect these related but distinct projects and help us understand larger concerns of race and gender?

ZT: That’s such an interesting question! With Du Bois, I am primarily referencing the famous scene in The Souls of Black Folk in the schoolhouse, where double consciousness wells up in his psyche. There’s a lot one can say about gender there that evaded my focus at the time.

Where I think there’s a connection with Harper is in the way Du Bois articulates how double consciousness produces a self-interrogational mode of being. In a moment, the color line is established as the difference between the self-ignorance of the white subject and the self-knowledge of the Black subject. Du Bois narrates the dawning of the realization of his own incompleteness. The negative recognition that one isn’t wholly oneself, that one isn’t a complete, filled-in subject without contradiction–that knowledge is painful knowledge, but it’s knowledge nonetheless.

Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness as knowledge of self-contradiction helps to break open sentimental readings of Harper, which assume that a truly sympathetic image or self-image could (at least in principle) match some pure, authentic inner self. Harper’s lyrics are more complex than critics often realize. She apostrophizes readers in the process of attempting to visualize the very scenes she’s sketching in her poems. There’s always a hint of something we can’t see. So, she devotes significant attention to the differences between inner profiles, outer profiles, and the ideal of some colorless inner self. It isn’t just to say that the inner self is the primary thing, but that there’s an absence at the core of every subject and that lyric poetry has the tools to (possibly, under the right conditions) shape that absence. 

If there’s a controversial aspect of my reading here, it might be this: I’m trying to position Harper’s work relative to Americanist lyric theory that holds the category of lyric to be either implicitly white or producing a false universalization that colors its speaker white by default. My point is that Harper really believes in the possibility of unmarking the marked body or unmarking the marked subject against steep odds. Usually, in her poetry, this relates to stereotypes cast onto an entire population by an unnamed social-poetic force. For example, racist metaphors of “blackness as evil” or “blackness as marked by sin.” Put broadly, lyric is an instrument of futurity for Harper, of abstraction that assists the future’s arrival.

I don’t know if that fully articulates the connection between Du Bois and Harper, but it has something to do with a sense that what we share, what everyone shares but that social inequalities conceal, is a self-incompleteness at odds with how socio-historical machines mark us as one type of person or another. But this isn’t to say that all you have to do is gaze into someone’s eyes and into their heart to see the common humanity you share. It’s not about ignoring or wishing away difference or the social structures of difference. There is, granted, a kind of utopianism achieved in Harper’s poetry. But it’s about imagining how, in the future, this poem will be read as a lyric, and thus, at the same time, imagining how the world would have to be for that to happen. We have to read the poems as contextualizable within a particular historical circumstance but nested within that frame (or pressing against it); there is always a desire for the poems to be purer lyric, to not depend on suffering for their existence. It’s a rhetorical tightrope she’s walking. 

CM: I’ll have to think further about it, but I think there is something between the two worthy of study. This connection makes me think of the term “masking” and how it often relates to how enslaved people had to mask their interiority. There’s more to the depth of the person than just the surface or what you see.

ZT: It’s almost as if to say that it’s necessary to rethink the surface-depth distinction. Not to privilege one or the other, but to say that what’s beneath the surface when we think of subjectivity is, in some sense, an absence. It’s hard to represent the subject because of that something “inside” the person that is more than themselves. It’s more than even the concept of the self. It’s a nothingness that sets everything (by which I mean, ultimately, desire) in motion. The inside circulates around an absence, but not one that can ever be filled. Harper prods her readers to think about absence as a condition of self-identity. 

CM: Speaking of reading the surface, I see more and more people including a coda rather than a conclusion in their academic monographs. For some reason, your discussion of the “glance” led to a light bulb moment for me. I was like, “Oh, wait! The coda is like the glancing structure of a book, and it doesn’t wrap up things or tie a bow around the book. It looks forward to things in a creative way.” Is a coda a written, structural form of the “glance?” And, what did it do for you that a conclusion could not? 

MB: Similar to Courtney, I was struck by the fact that the Coda doesn’t actually wrap things up. In many ways, it suggests that the “glance” is not complete and not satisfied. So I was wondering, do you plan on carrying the “glance” with you into your next book project, or is this your way of inviting other scholars into the “glance?”

ZT: Good questions! 

I’ll take the last one first. A simple answer is that I think it is more of an invitation to others than to myself. I am working on a couple of other projects, and none of them are sequels to this book.

But, yeah, I think you’re both right that what I liked about the Coda was that it allowed me to go back to the mode that I started the book with. It’s a relatively short Coda, but it’s very glancing in its way of looking between a series of things without necessarily having an overarching template. I mean, some people read it and think it’s primarily about William Carlos Williams, but I wouldn’t characterize it that way. I see it as a cluster of adjacent pathways where the study of the “glance” leaks into modernism and into the twentieth century, including into the history of cinema, which is the most significant art historical field in terms of overall cultural impact in the twentieth century. 

It made sense to me to end with the poetics of film because of its pregnant state at the end of the nineteenth century. The “glance” as a probe for a new stage of art and visual media was always pointing towards cinema. That’s the implicit historical logic I was working with, at least, but it didn’t really make sense to me to make the book longer and turn that part of the story into its own chapter. I think it would have felt more like an appendage than a proper ending. So, for me, it made sense as a short, glancing coda that opens my study up to the twentieth century and that other scholars could run with if they chose. 

There weren’t many books on the “glance” before this one. The biggest one is by Edward Casey, whom I cite several times. It’s a densely phenomenological study, not a literary one. You find these stray things; occasionally, the “glance” will come up in studies of modernism, studies of train travel photography, or cinema. It’s not uncommon to link the stroboscopic effect of cinema to the saccades of the human eye.

So, yeah, I begin the book by taking a lot of strands and stitching them together, which is what the “glance” does. Then, I use the Coda to unravel those strands so that they flutter softly out into the twentieth century (glances unravel and drift, too).

You both definitely saw what I was doing there with the structure.

Oh, and you asked about the Coda form being used more and more. That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have an answer to that, but I think it’s probably related to a growing dissatisfaction with the repetition of the traditional conclusion. When you move from dissertation to book, you often have to slim it down, so the first thing you might do is cut out repetition. Your introduction probably already offers a schematic breakdown of the argument’s structure. Why do it twice?