Lively analysis of how Henry James's fiction anticipates later filmmakers' concerns with what we can see and what we can know.
Perched as he was at the beginning of literary modernism and the evolution of film as a medium, Henry James addressed a cluster of epistemological and aesthetic issues related to the visualization of reality. In Knowing It When You See It, Patrick OβDonnell compares several late novels and stories by Henry James with a series of films directed by Michael HanekΓ©, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and Lars Von Trier. OβDonnell argues that these issues find parallels in films made at the other end of an arc extending from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the initial years of the twenty-first. In mapping affinities between literature and film, he is not concerned with adaptation or discursivity, but rather with how the βvisualβ is represented in two mediumsβwith how seeing becomes knowledge, how framing what is seen becomes a critical part of the story that is conveyed, and how the perspective of the camera or the narrator shapes reality. Both James and these later auteurs βthinkβ visually in ways that inter-illuminate their fictions and films, and newly bring into relief the trajectory of modernity in relation to visuality.