Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew (review)

investigation of materiality in literature, an engagement with literature in its material dimension is something that lingers unaddressed. This is less a criticism of the work’s merits and more of an observation of where it fits within a burgeoning albeit earnest “material turn” in literary studies.2 Nonetheless, it surprises that a study concerned with revising realism’s attempted erasure of the material world would not engage even briefly with the materiality of the objects upon which those interpretations rests. However, in tracing and uncovering the meaning-potential of materiality and its representation (or lack thereof) back to the nineteenth century, Weitzman’s conceptual lens provides a new angle with which to observe what we don’t often wish to see. Though grounded in realist literature, her study offers a wealth of material for its broader aesthetic and theoretical considerations of what, how and why something or someone is rendered in/visible.