The Senses of Modernism

[Dave Monroe]

THE SENSES OF MODERNISM
Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics
Sara Danius


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.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3796

http://books.google.com/books?id=N60vnjQ_FsAC