Matthew Levay

In a discussion of film’s temporality, and specifically of the relationship between the image of the performer onscreen and the viewer’s awareness of time’s passage since that image’s capture, Stanley Cavell offers the above analogy explaining the nostalgic response to an old photograph via the temporal distance between observer and observed. For Cavell, nostalgia results when we know something about the future of the observed subject—in this case, everything contained within the camera frame—that that subject cannot kno

One cannot review Hannah Frank’s Frame by Frame without observing that it is a book marked by tragedy, specifically its author’s passing in 2017. That might have meant the end of the present volume—a lightly edited revision of Frank’s dissertation—had it not been for a few prominent advocates who saw it through to publication, even as they cautioned that, without much opportunity for revision, readers should consider Frame by Frame a work in progress. In his editor’s introduction, Daniel Morgan explains that the book “is basically the dissertation that Frank defended in August 2016,” and “not the book that she would have published,” as Frank had already begun planning extensive changes to the manuscript that she did not live to complete (xxii).

There are a number of books yet to be written that modernist studies desperately needs. Many of us no doubt keep mental lists of the titles we hope to write ourselves, as well as longer lists of those we hope others will complete, preferably sooner than later. These hypothetical books exist for various reasons—to fill gaps in the critical record, to reassess or depose a well-established approach, to illuminate one of the remaining dark corners of modernism’s history— but my list is largely populated with books I want to place in my students’ hands even more than my own.