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.
- 263 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
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Information
Topic
LittératureSubtopic
Critique littéraire moderneand
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
- Cover
- The Senses of Modernism
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Orpheus and the Machine
- 1 The Antitechnological Bias and Other Modernist Myths: Literature and the Question of Technology
- 2 Novel Visions and the Crisis of Culture: The Cultivation of the Interior in The Magic Mountain
- 3 The Education of the Senses: Remembrance of Things Past and the Modernist Rhetoric of Motion
- 4 The Aesthetics of Immediacy: Ulysses and The Autonomy of the Eye and the Ear
- Coda: The Legibility of the Modern World
- Notes
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Senses of Modernism by Sara Danius in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Littérature & Critique littéraire moderne. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.