Four chapters on individual American authors with a conclusion apply certain concepts within these debates on the new media to particular works of literature both familiar and relatively obscure in order to, as North states, "pose a significant test for the ideas proposed" in his book.

Chapter Two focuses on the avant-garde literary magazine transition, its founding editor Eugene Jolas, and early silent cinema in order to show the relationship between international modernism and the movies.

[2] This "crisis of sound," and the anxiety of contamination it represents, played an important role in the aesthetic project of transition, and so North examines the experimental poetry of Jolas published in the magazine, particularly in terms of its "celebrated Revolution of the Word,"[2] along with the "reading machines" of Bob Brown in order to locate points where literature and poetry themselves were attempting to achieve a kind of visuality akin to cinema and photography, suggesting that boundaries between "word, sound, and image," and between the old and new media, were not nearly as definitive as some might have wanted to believe.

"[2] The third and final section of Camera Works extends North's general theoretical framework while applying it directly to several texts by select modernist American writers, examining ways in which F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, W.E.B.

From Fitzgerald, spectatorship, and the movies to Johnson, lynchings, and the visual production of race, North argues that writers and artists responded to the new media with "mistrust,"[2] apprehension, and even a kind of "covert hatred,"[2] while simultaneously being inspired and challenged by them.

Beginning with its seemingly unwieldy premise, that photography, film, and sound technologies of the early twentieth century exposed paradoxes in, while casting doubt on, the authority of representation, mediation, and even perception in both old and new media, that the new, original, and present, for example, could also be standardized, deferred, and endlessly reproduced, and that it was this "complicat[ion of] the process of representation" that inspired modernist experimentation and formal innovation as a means of repairing or renegotiating this break, Camera Works presents "a general theory of the aesthetics of modernity,"[2] one that "take[s] very seriously the significant formal innovations provided by material history itself,"[2] through its scrupulously detailed account.