The Senses of Modernism

[Dave Monroe]

Danius, Sara.  The Senses of Modernism:
   Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002.

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.

Sara Danius is Lecturer in the Department of
Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden. During the
2001-2002 academic year she is a Fellow at the
Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She is the author of
Proust's Motor. 

Paper  2002  256pp  6 x 9  
12 halftones 
ISBN: 0-8014-8800-1  19.95s
Cloth  2002  256pp  6 x 9  
12 halftones 
ISBN: 0-8014-3899-3  45.00x

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornellpress/cup3_catalog.taf?_function=detail&Title_ID=3796&_UserReference=F92449897187CE60C0C5099B

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com