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

by Erica Fretwell

Duke University Press, 2020
eISBN: 978-1-4780-1245-0 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-0986-3 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1093-7
Library of Congress Classification BF237.F74 2020

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.

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

REVIEWS

“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

“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

“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

“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

“[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

“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

“[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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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