Sensory experiments : psychophysics, race, and the aesthetics of feeling

著者

    • Fretwell, Erica

書誌事項

Sensory experiments : psychophysics, race, and the aesthetics of feeling

Erica Fretwell

Duke University Press, 2020

  • : pbk

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注記

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-311) and index

収録内容

  • Sight : unreconstructed body images
  • Sound : the acoustics of social harmony
  • Smell : perfume, women, and other volatile spirits
  • Taste : sweet measures and lawless pleasures
  • Touch : life writing between skin and flesh
  • Coda : afterlives and antelives of feeling

内容説明・目次

内容説明

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 and 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 has largely been 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.

目次

Acknowledgments ix Introduction. New Sensation 1 1. Sight: Unreconstructed Body Images 35 Interval 1. Colorful Sounds 79 2. Sound: The Acoustics of Social Harmony 87 Interval 2. Notes on Scent 124 3. Smell: Perfume, Women, and Other Volatile Spirits 131 Interval 3. Olfactory Gusto 167 4. Taste: Scripts for Sweetness, Measures of Pleasure 174 Interval 4. Mouthfeel 213 5. Touch: Life Writing Between Skin and Flesh 221 Coda. Afterlives and Antelives of Feeling 257 Notes 265 Bibliography 298 Index

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