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.
What People are Saying About This
Enda Duffy
In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius balances high literary texts and technological matters to give us a nuanced account of how texts and technologies interrelate. New inventions—the x-ray, the movie camera, the telephone—spurred Proust, Joyce, and Mann to produce texts that show how the senses lead to knowledge. The Senses of Modernism is extremely timely, well written, and elegantly formulated.
Michael Hardt
Sara Danius provides a wonderfully fresh approach that casts the aesthetics of European high modernism in a new light.
Emily Apter
As the literary history of modernism comes to terms with the full impact of technological modernity on aesthetic invention, books such as The Senses of Modernism provide a crucial critical framework. Situating itself critically between the theoretical influences of Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler, this lucidly argued comparative study of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce shows how new technologies-from the x-ray to the gramophone-transformed the representation of sensory impressions even as they became 'naturalized' within modernist aesthetics.
Michael Wutz
The Senses of Modernism is an extraordinary investigation into the emerging audio and visual technologies of the late nineteenth century, particularly phonography and the cinema. Danius finds that they infiltrated and restructured the perceptual senses of the human subject. They also had a profound effect on modern modes of narrative perception.
