The Senses of Modernism
eBook - PDF

The Senses of Modernism

Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics

  1. 264 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Senses of Modernism

Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics

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About This Book

In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

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Information

Publisher
Cornell University Press
Year
2019
ISBN
9781501721168
Topic
Literature
Subtopic
Modern Literary Criticism
Index
Literature
and 
other 
essays 
is 
neither 
systematic 
nor 
unproblematical. 
At 
times, 
Ben-
jamin's 
engagement 
with 
Baudelaire's 
writings 
is 
superficial; 
he 
also 
fails 
to 
introduce 
distinctions 
between 
various 
kinds 
of 
technology. 
Nonethe-
less, 
important 
aspects 
of 
Benjamin's 
method 
may 
be 
appropriated, 
in 
particular 
the 
use 
of 
allegory 
as 
a 
mode 
of 
representing 
mediation. 
Once 
we 
look 
upon 
the 
bewildering 
variety 
of 
technologies, 
machines, 
and 
ap-
paratuses 
that 
emerged 
during 
the 
second 
half 
of 
the 
nineteenth 
century 
as 
allegories 
of 
the 
ways 
in 
which 
essentially 
social 
relations 
are 
reconfig-
ured, 
then 
we 
begin 
to 
discern 
how 
the 
topography 
of 
aesthetic 
mod-
ernism 
might 
be 
rethought. 
Those 
cultural 
practices 
that 
we 
know 
as 
modernism 
might 
then 
be 
seen 
as 
forms 
of"crisis 
management;' 
not 
exte-
rior 
to 
but 
already 
immersed 
in 
those 
conditions-technological, 
eco-
nomic, 
social-it 
sought 
to 
go 
beyond. 
54 
The 
Senses 
of 
Modernism 

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. The Senses of Modernism
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction: Orpheus and the Machine
  9. 1 The Antitechnological Bias and Other Modernist Myths: Literature and the Question of Technology
  10. 2 Novel Visions and the Crisis of Culture: The Cultivation of the Interior in The Magic Mountain
  11. 3 The Education of the Senses: Remembrance of Things Past and the Modernist Rhetoric of Motion
  12. 4 The Aesthetics of Immediacy: Ulysses and The Autonomy of the Eye and the Ear
  13. Coda: The Legibility of the Modern World
  14. Notes
  15. Index