Introduction. Eye Don’t See 1. I take the term imagetext from W. J. T. Mitchell, esp. Picture Theory. 2. See, for example, Attridge. In his commentary on impressionism Ford repeatedly discusses, at times contradictorily, the effort to represent and also move beyond personality. In “On Impressionism” (1913), for instance, he writes both that his method is a “frank expression of personality” and that he sedulously “avoid[s] letting his personality appear in the course of his work” (262, 269). Thus, it is an oversimplification to link literary impressionism exclusively with personality. 3. Lukács of course broadly rejected what he saw as modernism’s refusal to confront an objective reality (namely, a social and political reality), beginning with impressionism and culminating in surrealism. Fredric Jameson offers an influential formulation of this same argument as early as Fables of Aggression (1979), as does Erich Kahler, who coined the influential phrase inward turn to refer to modernism. 4. See Daston and Galison on philosophical discussions of the subjectivity of color (273–83). 5. The physiologist Ewald Hering developed the basic theory of color opponency in 1892, and the ophthalmologist Émile Javal theorized saccadic motion in 1878. For a brief introduction to the human visual system, see David M. Miller; and Richard L. Gregory. 6. Two key terms here and throughout this book are visuality and vernacular. As Hal Foster aptly explains, if vision is the “mechanism” and “datum” of sight, then visuality is vision’s “historical techniques” and “discursive determinations.” The histories of vision and visuality together suggest the many differences between “how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein” (ix). As Katherine Pandora has argued, the phrase scientific vernacular signals “a broader sense of the history of ‘everyday scientific knowledge,’” beyond simply the direct narratives of scientists themselves. It is “a kind of ‘intellectual common’ where social and theoretical comment can circulate without regard for scientific propriety” (491, 492). Notes 278 Notes to Pages 6–18 7. Hereafter, emphasis is original unless otherwise noted. 8. The “two cultures” narrative derives from the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture of that title, a lecture that bemoans a contemporary split between the sciences and the humanities. As their titles suggest, Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds and Flint’s Victorians and the Visual Imagination focus on the nineteenth century. Willis extends into the Edwardian period but focuses only on the genre fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. Firmly modernist studies like Craig Gordon’s or those by Bruce Clarke don’t consider ocular science. An important exception to this trend is James Krasner’s Entangled Eye, though it concentrates more on evolutionary narrative. 9. See Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, in which he points to the first decades of the nineteenth century as a moment when the truth of vision became grounded in the density and materiality of the body, thereby marking the birth of modern visuality . Also see Foucault’s The Order of Things, in which he describes the nineteenth century as the moment when the system of thought no longer existed outside and beyond humanity but instead had physiological conditions. 10. On Kepler’s theory and influence, see Lindberg; and Wade and Finger. 11. Martin Jay writes of the ocularcentrism of Western philosophy: “The development of Western philosophy cannot be understood . . . without attending to its habitual dependence on visual metaphors of one sort or another. From the shadows playing on the walls of Plato’s cave and Augustine’s praise of the divine light to Descartes ’s ideas available to a ‘steadfast mental gaze’ and the Enlightenment’s faith in the data of our senses, the ocularcentric underpinnings of our philosophical tradition have been undeniably pervasive” (186). 12. Even though Descartes’ description rejects visual semblance (because he locates the eye as a site of error), his sense of the corrective force of intuition is based largely on visual metaphors. In other words, he effectively transfers the properties of the visible to a kind of mental schematism, resulting in an objective mental vision. 13. See Wade and Finger and, more extensively, Atherton on Descartes’ physiological experiments and speculation, as well as Lokhorst on the pineal gland. 14. On this shift, see Langer; and Wettlaufer. 15. On this representational history, see Hagstrum; Ray Frazer; Park; and Mitchell, Iconology. 16. See Daston and Galison’s chapters “Mechanical Objectivity” and “Structural Objectivity” for more on...