Format:
1 Online-Ressource (324 Seiten)
ISBN:
9781478012450
Content:
Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: NEW SENSATION -- 1. Sight: UNRECONSTRUCTED BODY IMAGES -- 2. Sound: THE ACOUSTICS OF SOCIAL HARMONY -- 3. Smell: PERFUME, WOMEN, AND OTHER VOLATILE SPIRITS -- 4. Taste: SCRIPTS FOR SWEETNESS, MEASURES OF PLEASURE -- 5. Touch: LIFE WRITING BETWEEN SKIN AND FLESH -- Coda: AFTERLIVES AND ANTELIVES OF FEELING -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Content:
In Sensory Experiments Erica Fretwell excavates the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation to examine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of “feeling” in nineteenth-century America. Fretwell demonstrates how psychophysics—a scientific movement originating in Germany dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience—shifted the understandings of feeling from the epistemology of sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience. Through analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the work of canonical figures ranging from Kate Chopin and Pauline Hopkins to James Weldon Johnson and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became important elements in the biopolitical work of constructing human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability. In its entanglement with social difference, psychophysics contributed to the racialization of aesthetics while sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being, over and against the figure of the bourgeois, liberal individual. Although psychophysics is largely forgotten, Fretwell demonstrates that its importance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory
Note:
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9781478009863
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9781478010937
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als print ISBN 9781478010937
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1515/9781478012450
URL:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012450
URL:
https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781478012450
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