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Camera Creatures addresses the new media landscape in which cameras, in most situations, outnumber pens. The dissertation argues that despite the accessibility and power of imagemaking devices, there persists in the humanities and social sciences a hesitation to engage the possibilities for composing with optical media. A number of factors contributing to this trend are addressed, including the preference for image analysis over imagemaking practices, persistent assumptions of the camera's mechanical objectivity, and a tendency to teach visual invention as collage. As a counter-measure, a proposal is made for investment in the mediation of light, or 'photonic rhetorics.' To explore these effects in visual communication and the possibility of bringing them into practice, three emerging camera technologies are examined. The first, the photo app, focuses on the controversy surrounding embedded journalists who use social networks and the Hipstamatic camera phone application to relay stories of U.S. Marines deployed in Afghanistan. The chapter argues that the filters and shooting styles of these mobile apps encourage fluencies in the persuasive effects of light. The second camera technology, the video clip, addresses the long take as the predominant technique of everyday video-making. Film theory, video sharing trends, and circadian science contribute to a discussion of the rhythms of long-take shooting and its capability to expose both visual habits and the contingencies capable of disrupting them. The third site turns to video game 'shooters' and the virtual camera's construction of 'surrogate vision,' which the author argues is a critical tool for understanding the future of mediated interactivity in both physical and digital landscapes. The dissertation concludes with a pedagogical section devoted to conscientious cheating. Alongside theories of deliberate practice, 'cheating' is repurposed for education, offering new ways of testing the 'rules' of optical composition while discovering opportunities to intervene in light's constant mediation of perception.

This dissertation traces the vexing complexity of the relationship between naturalist literature of the American 1890s and emerging technologies of visual representation: although photographic representation was frequently invoked as naturalism’s ideal model, the novels I consider are better characterized as skeptical interrogators, rather than as eager imitators, of photographic accuracy. In Frank Norris’s McTeague, for example, narrative shifts between intimacy and distance mirror the promise and threat epitomized by the practice of documentary photographers like Jacob Riis. Riis’s photography represented an ideal of accuracy, but McTeague’s narrator ultimately rejects it: the threat of becoming complicit in reprehensible acts or of becoming indistinguishable from their perpetrators, proves too great a risk for the reward of producing a photographically accurate representation. Stephen Crane’s The Monster offers a similarly skeptical assessment of the potential of narrative mediation, one that I read through a comparative consideration of Crane’s novella and the practice of the moving picture lecturers of the 1890s. I argue that these lecturers—poised between a didactic culture of genteel entertainments and an emerging culture of film that was more interested in thrilling than in edifying its audience—embodied the kind of paradoxical mediation that complicates any moral or ethical interpretation of The Monster. In Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, photography and film model representational modes that seem better suited to the hapless characters of these novels than to their knowledgeable narrators. What Maisie Knew articulates the possibility of a naturalist brute mastering her own story. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier represents the unique accuracy of the embodied, subjective experience of individual subjects, an experience figured by the novel’s soundscape of music and noise. This soundscape functions much like those of early films, in which the sounds of so-called “silent” films often indexed a reality that exceeded the limits of the images playing on the screen. My dissertation urges us to take naturalism seriously, as an insightful commentator on a social world in which everything, it seems, can be made readily available for our viewing pleasure.