Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

by Erica Fretwell

Overview

In Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell excavates the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation to examine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of feeling in nineteenth-century America. Fretwell demonstrates how psychophysics—a scientific movement originating in Germany and dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience—shifted the understandings of feeling from the epistemology of sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience. Through analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the work of canonical figures ranging from Kate Chopin and Pauline Hopkins to James Weldon Johnson and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became important elements in the biopolitical work of constructing human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability. In its entanglement with social difference, psychophysics contributed to the racialization of aesthetics while sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being over and against the figure of the bourgeois liberal individual. Although psychophysics has largely been forgotten, Fretwell demonstrates that its importance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478012450
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/14/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Erica Fretwell is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. New Sensation  1
1. Sight: Unreconstructed Body Images  35
Interval 1. Colorful Sounds  79
2. Sound: The Acoustics of Social Harmony  87
Interval 2. Notes on Scent  124
3. Smell: Perfume, Women, and Other Volatile Spirits  131
Interval 3. Olfactory Gusto  167
4. Taste: Scripts for Sweetness, Measures of Pleasure  174
Interval 4. Mouthfeel  213
5. Touch: Life Writing Between Skin and Flesh  221
Coda. Afterlives and Antelives of Feeling  257
Notes  265
Bibliography  298
Index

What People are Saying About This

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization - Hsuan L. Hsu

“Historicizing the intersections between nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality, race, and aesthetic experience, Erica Fretwell produces a wide-reaching framework for understanding the stakes of sensory experience. The result is a rigorous historical approach to nineteenth-century science and culture that underscores efforts to ‘educate’ or ‘civilize’ the senses. This brilliant, original, and important book will make waves in race studies, sensory studies, American studies, the history of science, and American literature.”

Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism - Peter Coviello

“With precision, writerly grace, and great analytic power, Erica Fretwell uses the backstory of psychophysics to map out the contradictory ways feeling subjects came to be thought in the nineteenth century. This is a uniquely strong book, anchored in exacting historical, theoretical, and exegetical scholarship. It stands to make a powerful intervention into nineteenth-century literary studies and especially into science studies, critical race studies, and biopolitical critique.”

Editorial Reviews

[Sensory Experiments] is poised to make a significant and lasting intervention across fields. For scholars of sensory studies, affect theory, and American literature, it is deeply important reading.

Papers On Language & Literature - Jake McGinnis

With precision, writerly grace, and great analytic power, Erica Fretwell uses the backstory of psychophysics to map out the contradictory ways feeling subjects came to be thought in the nineteenth century. This is a uniquely strong book, anchored in exacting historical, theoretical, and exegetical scholarship. It stands to make a powerful intervention into nineteenth-century literary studies and especially into science studies, critical race studies, and biopolitical critique.

Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism - Peter Coviello

In her excellent Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell puts forward an insightful thesis informed by an intelligent selection of the literature and a rigorous multi-disciplinary analysis. . . . It should appeal . . . to any reader with an interest in the history of psychology, aesthetics, or U.S. culture in the post-Civil War period.

Centaurus - Jorge Castro-Tejerina

[Fretwell’s] writing is deeply satisfying and provocative. . . . Fretwell deftly navigates a shocking variety of source types and between the disciplines of literature studies, cultural and intellectual history, and sensory studies with ease. SensoryExperiments will be an important book for all of these fields and more.

Social History Of Medicine - Alexandra Huis

Fretwell hits a sweet spot between science and culture, offering a wide-ranging experimental archive on the aesthetic history of the US. Like any good archive, this work opens a view not only to the past but also forcefully into the future. Anyone interested in the aesthetic dimension of contemporary social life, regardless of its specific context, will benefit from reading the textual experiments Fretwell so deftly performs. Highly recommended.

Choice - B. G. Chang

Sensory Experiments points us not only to the ways in which senses served as a substrate for considerations of self and subjectivity for cultural producers in the nineteenth century; it also suggests that we be continually aware—and conscious of, and careful with—our own assessments of contemporary sense and sensation.

The Senses and Society - Michael Rossi

Historicizing the intersections among nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality, race, and aesthetic experience, Erica Fretwell produces a wide-reaching framework for understanding the stakes of sensory experience. The result is a rigorous historical approach to nineteenth-century science and culture that underscores efforts to ‘educate’ or ‘civilize’ the senses. This brilliant, original, and important book will make waves in race studies, sensory studies, American studies, the history of science, and American literature.

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization - Hsuan L. Hsu

"Sensory Experiments points us not only to the ways in which senses served as a substrate for considerations of self and subjectivity for cultural producers in the nineteenth century; it also suggests that we be continually aware--and conscious of, and careful with--our own assessments of contemporary sense and sensation."--Michael Rossi "The Senses and Society" (2/22/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"[Sensory Experiments] is poised to make a significant and lasting intervention across fields. For scholars of sensory studies, affect theory, and American literature, it is deeply important reading."--Jake McGinnis "Papers On Language & Literature" (11/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"[Fretwell's] writing is deeply satisfying and provocative. . . . Fretwell deftly navigates a shocking variety of source types and between the disciplines of literature studies, cultural and intellectual history, and sensory studies with ease. SensoryExperiments will be an important book for all of these fields and more."--Alexandra Huis "Social History Of Medicine" (7/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Fretwell hits a sweet spot between science and culture, offering a wide-ranging experimental archive on the aesthetic history of the US. Like any good archive, this work opens a view not only to the past but also forcefully into the future. Anyone interested in the aesthetic dimension of contemporary social life, regardless of its specific context, will benefit from reading the textual experiments Fretwell so deftly performs. Highly recommended."--B. G. Chang "Choice" (8/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"In her excellent Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell puts forward an insightful thesis informed by an intelligent selection of the literature and a rigorous multi-disciplinary analysis. . . . It should appeal . . . to any reader with an interest in the history of psychology, aesthetics, or U.S. culture in the post-Civil War period."--Jorge Castro-Tejerina "Centaurus" (11/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Historicizing the intersections among nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality, race, and aesthetic experience, Erica Fretwell produces a wide-reaching framework for understanding the stakes of sensory experience. The result is a rigorous historical approach to nineteenth-century science and culture that underscores efforts to 'educate' or 'civilize' the senses. This brilliant, original, and important book will make waves in race studies, sensory studies, American studies, the history of science, and American literature."--Hsuan L. Hsu, author of "Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization"

"With precision, writerly grace, and great analytic power, Erica Fretwell uses the backstory of psychophysics to map out the contradictory ways feeling subjects came to be thought in the nineteenth century. This is a uniquely strong book, anchored in exacting historical, theoretical, and exegetical scholarship. It stands to make a powerful intervention into nineteenth-century literary studies and especially into science studies, critical race studies, and biopolitical critique."--Peter Coviello, author of "Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism"

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