Abstract
The photoplay novels were a medium of the silent film era that blended stills from films distributed by the major film studios with the novels issued by publishers of reprint editions. Photoplay novels established new protocols for seeing, reading and experiences of the self for mainstream audiences. The photoplays based on Anzia Yezierska’s autobiographical stories made into films, Hungry Hearts (1922) and Salome of the Tenements (1927), are immigrant narratives of relocation, the making of an American self, and a version of the New Woman. Their reading as replacement narratives reveals irreconcilable geographies of the new and the old world and the presentations of a gendered immigrant self that paralleled Yezierska’s own condition of incomplete ‘replacement’.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘sensorium’ refers to the human senses as a grouping and ‘our habits of indexicality [that] create correspondences between perceptions of the world and the meanings we give to those perceptions’ (Panagia and Richard: n.p.). In media theory, the forms of displacement by which perceptions and meanings are shifted and mediated through techniques (for example, photoplay novels as an intermedium that combines film and novel), offer new possibilities for the human sensorium, reworking of senses, subjectivities, and operations of the self, mind and social experience.
- 2.
Initially, films were one or two reels long and lasted less than seventeen minutes. By the mid-1910s, the length of a film expanded to five or six reels of over-an-hour duration of play, a technological change that affected the ability of film to tell a story, with the emergence of the feature film. Film evolved as a distinct medium with its own narrative modes between 1910 and 1917 when motion pictures became an industry.
- 3.
Intertexts (prefaces, advertisements and blurbs) were combined with descriptions in public epitext (including promotional materials); external to texts but having a liminal presence as ‘paratextual element not materially appended to the text ’ (Genette 2009: 344).
- 4.
On the hybridity of text and image see W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1993).
- 5.
The references to contemporary events involve Charles S. Whitman , District Attorney for the Borough of Manhattan and Whitman’s White Slave Report (Ball 1914: [2]).
- 6.
On how Dewey was also an important authority figure in Anzia Yezierska’s life and a protagonist of her own ‘Cinderella’ story, see Dearborn 1989.
- 7.
Her meddling with the screenplay ended her relationship with the Samuel Goldwyn studio (Ginsberg 2016: 106).
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Dalbello, M. (2018). The metaphysics of replacement in photoplay novels of immigration. In: Owen, J., Segal, N. (eds) On Replacement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76011-7_8
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