Peter Lurie

Candidate statement

Dr Lurie is a long-standing member of the MSA, overseeing and contributing to film-and-literature panels. He is a genuinely interdisciplinary scholar of modernism, moving back and forth between literary and visual texts, especially photography, cinema, and more recently digital media. His first book, Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination, about the “film idea” in Faulkner’s modernism, became foundational for a wave of scholarship about Faulkner and visual culture. His second book, American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film, examines the ways film and literature provide oblique glimpses into America’s racial history and its evasions. Lurie’s current book project is Black Evanescence: Seeing Racial Difference from the Slave Narrative to Digital Media, is about the relations among Black visual and literary cultures. It’s a broad-sweeping project that begins with Frederick Douglass; discusses the visual aspect of literary modernism as it attends race; traces the long “film century” of Hollywood's mis-representation of Blackness; describes the 2009 film Precious and its protagonist’s own dual sense of vision across the digital divide; and ends with a distant reading of race and culture in contemporary cinema and public art. Dr Lurie is also an active member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a member of the MLA’s Screen Arts and Culture Forum Executive Committee.
Four relevant publications:
• Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination Johns Hopkins UP 2003.
• American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film Oxford UP 2017.
• “Richard Linklater [Special Section].” Film Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, pp. 34–72. Includes Lurie, “Digital Déjà vu: Cinephilia, Loss, and Medial Integrity in Linklater’s Before Trilogy.” Film Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, pp. 60–66
• “History’s Dark Markings: Faulkner and Film’s Racial Representation.” In: Matthews JT, ed. The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge University Press; 2015: 29-43.