We invite historians of literature, the arts, science, and religion to collaborate with us to explore the fundamental role that sensory culture had in early modern culture. The objects offered to the senses, and their display in art or literature, materialized in a rich array of mixed media. In classical literature and in certain provinces of Shakespeare studies, for instance, the idea of synaesthesia has been invoked as a point of access to a large phenomenological body of evidence; we know comparatively less, however, about early modern resistances to the hierarchy of the senses, Aristotelian or not (On the Soul, 2.6-12, 418a-424b), and about collective cognition in general. And while under the influence of the ‘material turn’, touch, smell, taste, and sound have been thoroughly studied in their spectrum of anthropological resonances, the question of their interaction is still largely neglected.
Thematically, we are interested in the interconnectedness between the senses themselves, and the various levels of connections between theorizing the senses and the actual lived experiences of the age in a variety of cultural expression grounded in memory, textual practices, or performative arts. When was something codified as multi-sensorial? Did the dissemination of print bring about a shift in the ratio of the senses? What is the afterlife of the Aristotelian ‘common sense’? What are the ethical and philosophical implications of sensing?
Geographically, we are especially interested in
- works engaging Iberia and eastern Europe since work on the senses in these languages and literatures has been underexplored in recent publications by the larger academic presses, and
- literatures of encounter between Europeans and their Others. In what ways does sensation create difference? How do local or regional constructions of the senses shape the understanding or misunderstanding of non-Europeans by Europeans, for example? What counts as being sensorially connected or sensorially Other?
Contact Info: Marlene Eberhart (Vanier College, Montreal); Contact via the ACLA Seminar Listing.