This book reappraises the connections between modernist writing and photography in the light of new work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images. Arguing for the importance of photography to the work of four major modernist authors—Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—it proposes a new theory of composite literary form in the first half of the twentieth century. Segmented and reiterative, composite modernist writing is shaped by the figure of the woman-in-series, whose appearances and disappearances map its connective and disconnective structure. Understood in relation to the syntax of visual spacing in serial photography, the formal interstices that define modernist writing emerge as textual sites in which the dominant social and political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. These gaps signify both as marks of trauma, the wounds of representation according to typologies of race, gender, and class, and as a means for evading or defending against this trauma: a zone of withdrawal and recalcitrance for female characters. Moving in and out of sight, from presence to absence and back again, the woman-in-series in modernist writing destabilizes oppositions of power and vulnerability as they relate to the interactions of subjects and objects in the representational realm.