Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism, by Christina Walter. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 352 pages. Fashioning foundational book within contemporary modernist studies is rare occurrence, especially when text relates to well-known concept such as modernist impersonality--yet Christina Walter has fashioned just such text. She issues call for scholars to reevaluate traditional understanding that impersonality is merely negation of personality, view that align[s] modernism with an old notion of (25). She then insists that modernist impersonality has more to do with exploring essence of personality and directs scholars to consider modernists' turn toward optical science and visual-scientific vernacular as means of creating what she describes as optical impersonality. Walter explicitly defines optical impersonality as combination of subjectivity and its social consequences (6). In other words, modernists used impersonality to ask how new physiology of challenged their notions of material, bodily, human subjects and how this vision applied across gender, racial, and class distinctions that had long distinguished supposedly disembodied male subject from everyone else (27). Walter explains that modernists experimented with optical impersonality through imagetextuality--that is, blurring of line between seeable and sayable--a term that Walter borrows from W. J. T. Mitchell, who uses it to help explain postmodernity. Yet, Walter wishes to write a different history of imagetext's appearance in modernist studies (13). Through an exploration that spans art history, literature, gender and queer studies, physics, and contemporary affect theory, Walter sets out to demonstrate that optical impersonality, which was produced by new understanding of physiology of vision, allowed modernist writers to examine the making and unmaking of (27). Indeed, Walter's book presents scientific perspective that has been missing from much work in modernist studies, but such perspective is necessary if future scholars are to engage productively in multiplicity of discourses surrounding gender, race, and identity in modernism. In her introduction, Walter sets up conceptual framework that considers three cultural and historical realms that figure in her study of optical impersonality: history of optical science, history of image-text relations, and history of personality (7). A brief history of optical science, from Cartesian notion of sight as faithful record for autonomous mind to Helmholtz's suggestion of an observer, helps readers to contextualize rest of Walter's argument according to its relation to modernists' evaluation and rejection of mind/body duality. Just as optics blurs line between subject and object, Walter allows concept of imagetextuality to blur line between image and text. Finally, Walter previews historical evolution of personality from marker of individuality into performance of constructed identity. Imagetextuality moves to forefront of Walter's agenda in chapter 1, in which she evaluates Walter Pater, nineteenth-century philosopher and art historian. Walter explains that one of Pater's most famous art history texts, The Renaissance (1873), play [s] on inseparability of word and image; for her, Pater's conception of imagetext is of an opaque and fragmented structure that leaves the reader always desiring to know, and always faced with limits of knowing (35, 46). For Walter, this prophetic notion of imagetext also points to Pater's presentation of embodied (40); that is, by continually pointing to limits of vision, Pater calls attention to bodily limitations in experiencing art. Though Pater's experimentation with image/text binary challenges identity, he never attempted to resolve issues of identity and personality. …