eBook - PDF

Sensory Experiments

Name: Sensory Experiments
ISBN: 9781478012450

Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

Erica Fretwell,

English
PDF
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - PDF

Sensory Experiments

Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

Erica Fretwell,

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Sensory Experiments by Erica Fretwell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Feminist Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.