Senses of Modernism

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.

Danius's historical analysis of the complex relationship of technology to literary/aesthetic modernism (emphasizing the years 1880-1930) provides a new and challenging view of high classical modernism.... Danius bases her observations and conclusions on a solid survey of past critical thought; 37 pages of detailed notes and a 13-page index make the study especially useful for advanced scholars. Summing Up: Recommended., In this book, Sara Danius examines the ways that new technologies influenced the arts of classic modernism from 1880 to 1930, with a concentration on high modernism, in the 1920s.... I found the book intriguing and fascinating. It is certainly an important contribution to our understanding of the intersection of perception and technology, and provides important insights about the role that technology can play in the arts., The central aim of this accomplished and lucid study is to dispel the notion that perception in modernist texts can be seen as a flight from the world of modernity and technology into subjectivity and particularity.... Danius's assertion that the senses become technologically mediated in modernity is supported by discussions of visual theory as it is implicit in various optical devices, in Sander's photo-archive, Marey's work, and the conceptualization of cinema in Vertov and others., In her persuasive, well-written exploration of technology's essential yet underestimated role in high modernism, Danius establishes a vivid picture of the modernist landscape as one where technologically enhanced means of perception became a prominent component of the aesthetic discourse.... Danius's ability to utilize a wide body of theory and to draw adeptly on examples from film, painting, and photography to support her close readings of three pioneering modernist novels makes this a provocative, rewarding study from a variety of vantage points., Overall, this is a challenging and rewarding analysis by a literary scholar who is deeply immersed in the aesthetic categories of High Modernism. It may be well to note that she is interested in technologies such as X-rays not as artifacts but insofar as they affect the perceptual apparatus of the modern subject.

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.