Modernism's Portrait Logic: Tracing the Ethical Dimensions of Perception and Imagination in the Works of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner

This dissertation traces how advancements in visual technologies from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century reshaped modernist literary strategies for representing perception and imagination. Focusing specifically on the period between the advent of photography and the emergence of cinema, it argues that new forms of media, including X-ray technology, portrait photography, and sound cinema, generated an epistemological and ethical crisis surrounding the limits of knowing and accessing other minds. While existing scholarship has emphasized the aesthetic consequences of such media, less attention has been given to the ethical dimensions of perception and imagination. Through an analysis of the interaction between emerging visual media and older aesthetic forms such as painting, this dissertation argues that modernist writers develop what I term “portrait logic,” a formal mode structured by visual arrest and interpretive mastery, in response to a culture of heightened visual exposure. Although portrait logic enables new techniques for representing interiority without violating its privacy, it also threatens to immobilize narrative temporality and to reduce other minds to objects of knowledge. In response to this narrative problem, writers experiment with alternative perceptual and imaginative modes shaped by indeterminacy. In Henry James and Virginia Woolf, this shift gives rise to what I call “ethical imagination,” which emerges from a broader perceptual reorientation away from portraiture and toward the landscape as a visual form. In contrast, Faulkner’s work develops a temporal logic of retrospective recursion, in which the imagination becomes aligned with mechanical reproducibility, repetition, and replay, his dusty landscapes often obscuring the possibility of ethical relation. Through close readings of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881 and 1908 editions), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, this project integrates literary analysis with media and novel theory to demonstrate how, through narrative form, new modes of perception and imagination emerge, contributing to modernism’s democratic project. Reconceptualizing the imagination as an ethical practice rather than a purely mental faculty, this dissertation offers a new account of modernism’s engagement with visuality that brings aesthetics and ethics together to rethink how modernist narrative practices represent encounters between minds.