
Contents
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Introduction: acceleration from the Industrial Revolution to the high modernity of our digital culture Introduction: acceleration from the Industrial Revolution to the high modernity of our digital culture
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Contaminating action with observation: Henry James’s literary-scientific innovation Contaminating action with observation: Henry James’s literary-scientific innovation
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Contaminating the literary with the cinematic Contaminating the literary with the cinematic
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Beyond thought’s purity: contamination in James’s The Portrait of a Lady Beyond thought’s purity: contamination in James’s The Portrait of a Lady
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Conclusion: James, Hitchcock, Benjamin, or the persistence of fiction as ‘aura’ Conclusion: James, Hitchcock, Benjamin, or the persistence of fiction as ‘aura’
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Notes Notes
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5 Contaminating the Digital: Action and Perception in Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock
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Published:March 2016
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Abstract
Chapter discusses how James’s and Hitchcock’s respective questioning of acceleration is pertinent to a better understanding of our contemporary digital culture. This culture places a premium on actions, on doing. Acceleration has been ever increasing since the industrial revolution. Speed elevated doing: the sheer quantity of actions. James and Hitchcock in different yet related ways show how actions without the perceptive work of understanding can have deleterious consequences. Here perception is no longer removed from the world of action as has traditionally been the case in standard oppositions between the contemplative and the active life of politics. Anticipating the neuroscientific exploration of mirror neurons, the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady makes a strong case for the discovery action within perception. In a similar way, Hitchcock’s films make us see how behind what we take to be innocent dwells a more sinister world which we perceive when the speed of our perception slows down. Hitchcock’s suspense works at an epistemological level. It uncovers knowledge which has been hidden by societal concepts of respectability, order and purity. Isabel Archer holds us in suspense in a similar way: we are aware before she and other characters in the novel are that her quest for freedom will end up entrapping her.
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