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Empire of the senses : the sensual culture reader / edited by David Howes.

Contributor(s): Series: Sensory formations seriesPublication details: Oxford ; New York : Berg, 2005.Description: vii, 421 pages ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 9781859738634
  • 185973863X
  • 9781859738580
  • 1859738583
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction -- The mind's eye : what the blind see / Oliver Sacks -- Inside the five-sense sensorium / Marshall McLuhan -- Remembering the senses / Susan Stewart -- The witch's senses : sensory ideologies and transgressive femininities from the Renaissance to modernity / Constance Classen -- The senses divided : organs, objects, and media in early modern England / Carla Mazzio -- The death of the sensuous chemist : the 'new' chemistry and the transformation of sensuous technology / Lissa Roberts -- Charting the cultural history of the senses / Alain Corbin -- Mcluhan in the rainforest : the sensory worlds of oral cultures / Constance Classen -- Consciousness as 'feeling in the body' : a West African theory of embodiment, emotion, and the making of mind / Kathryn Linn Guerts -- Places senses, senses placed : toward a sensuous epistemology of environments / Steven Feld -- The tea ceremony : a symbolic analysis / Dorinne Kondo -- Engaging the spirits of modernity : temiar songs of a changing world / Marina Roseman -- Home cooking : Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong / Lisa Law -- A tonic of wildness : sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau / Victor Carl Friesen -- Volatile effects : olfactory dimensions of art and architecture / Jim Drobnick -- Hyperesthesia, or, The sensual logic of late capitalism / David Howes -- Under the jaguar sun / Italo Calvino -- Michel Serres' five senses / Steven Connor -- Darwin's disgust / William Ian Miller -- Strindberg's 'deranged sensations' / Hans-Göran Ekman -- Movement, stillness : on the sensory world of a shelter for the 'homeless mentally ill' / Robert Desjarlais -- Dystoposthesia : emplacing environmental sensitivities / Christopher Fletcher.
Summary: With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- The mind's eye : what the blind see / Oliver Sacks -- Inside the five-sense sensorium / Marshall McLuhan -- Remembering the senses / Susan Stewart -- The witch's senses : sensory ideologies and transgressive femininities from the Renaissance to modernity / Constance Classen -- The senses divided : organs, objects, and media in early modern England / Carla Mazzio -- The death of the sensuous chemist : the 'new' chemistry and the transformation of sensuous technology / Lissa Roberts -- Charting the cultural history of the senses / Alain Corbin -- Mcluhan in the rainforest : the sensory worlds of oral cultures / Constance Classen -- Consciousness as 'feeling in the body' : a West African theory of embodiment, emotion, and the making of mind / Kathryn Linn Guerts -- Places senses, senses placed : toward a sensuous epistemology of environments / Steven Feld -- The tea ceremony : a symbolic analysis / Dorinne Kondo -- Engaging the spirits of modernity : temiar songs of a changing world / Marina Roseman -- Home cooking : Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong / Lisa Law -- A tonic of wildness : sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau / Victor Carl Friesen -- Volatile effects : olfactory dimensions of art and architecture / Jim Drobnick -- Hyperesthesia, or, The sensual logic of late capitalism / David Howes -- Under the jaguar sun / Italo Calvino -- Michel Serres' five senses / Steven Connor -- Darwin's disgust / William Ian Miller -- Strindberg's 'deranged sensations' / Hans-Göran Ekman -- Movement, stillness : on the sensory world of a shelter for the 'homeless mentally ill' / Robert Desjarlais -- Dystoposthesia : emplacing environmental sensitivities / Christopher Fletcher.

With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.