Sunday, January 8, 2017

Eyegiene and Pulp Fiction: Saucy Detective Stories, v1 #5, August 1937 | Norman Saunders Cover Art

Norman Saunders cover, below, will have its day in Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race. Saunders' clever semiotic deconstruction (the pinup woman, object of the magazine purchaser's eye, is, herself, a camera operator, her cutting edge film camera--for then--more prominent in a way than either her shadowy pursuer or her own naked torso) signals a pre-post-structuralist understanding of the technology / representation / subjectivity matrix.  The image, contemporary with Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (actually Benjamin's opus comes out a year previous) augurs ideas that will see full development in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.


  • Saucy Detective Stories [v1 #5, August 1937] (25¢, 1-96+65b-128b, pulp, cover by Norman Saunders
  • Title page reads Saucy Stories. Details taken from a scan of a (partial) Table of Contents, supplemented by information from Nichole Rounds.
{source: William G. Contento's Homeville Fiction Magazine, main: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/   ||| specific issue info: index: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/cfi/t650.htm#A13253}

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