Literature and Film, Dispositioned ― Thought, Location, World

Literature and Film, Dispositioned looks to twentieth-century literature's encounter with film – silent film in particular – as a means to thinking about the locations of thought in literature. Interested especially in theories of free indirect style both literary and filmic, it brings these theories together by seeing the free indirect as involving less the representation of interiority than a disposition (a subjective temperament) that is also a dispositioning (subjectivity's displacement, or else its eclipsical quitting). In this sense, the book is also more broadly an exploration of the disposition of literature, the ways in which literature is disposed to the world, in the world. Meditative in its analyses, the book includes readings of works by James Joyce, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett; whose Film (1965) – filmed in New York City and starring a wizened and wrinkled Buster Keaton – forms a concluding focus.

Alice Honor Gavin studied literature at the University of Oxford, UK. Formerly a Fellow of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany, she currently teaches film and literature at the University of Sussex, UK.