Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel by Pardis Dabashi, assistant professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies, examines the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema, revealing a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction. Even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Watching Hollywood films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind by losing the plot. (The University of Chicago Press, 2023)