ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|35 pages
The Prescience of the Senses
section |32 pages
‘Culture Tunes Our Neurons’
part II|87 pages
The Shifting Sensorium
section |85 pages
Historicizing Perception
chapter 4|15 pages
The Witch's Senses
chapter 6|22 pages
The Death of the Sensuous Chemist
part III|102 pages
Sensescapes
section |99 pages
Sensation in Cultural Context
chapter 9|15 pages
Consciousness as ‘Feeling in the Body’
part IV|113 pages
The Aestheticization of Everyday Life
section |110 pages
Aestheticization Takes Command
part V|42 pages
The Derangement of the Senses
section |40 pages
The Senses Disordered