The Senses of Modernism: technology, perception, and aesthetics

By Sara Danius
Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY, 2002 247 pp.,
ISBN: 0-8014-3899-3; ISBN 0-8014-8800-1

Reviewed by George Shortess
Department of Psychology,
17 Memorial Drive East,
Lehigh University,
Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA

george.shortess@lehigh.edu

In this book, Sara Danius examines the ways that new technologies influenced the arts of classic modernism, 1880-1930, with a concentration on high modernism, in the 1920s. Basing her discussion primarily on literature, she analyzes in detail three modernist literary works, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (1924), Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).

In developing her analysis she first questions the usefulness of the split between the social, technologized popular culture and the aesthetic, nontechnologized high culture, a split which has pervaded much of the interpretative literature on modernism. She then argues that in order to understand modernism it is essential to see the works of the period, not merely as reflections of the new technologies, but rather as mediated by them. And the role of perception is central to these considerations, both direct perception and perception through technology. Technology not only changes the world, but changes the perception of the world. In Mann and Proust the characters comment on and experience these changes in perception (with the implication of these changes for knowing), while in Joyce perception in embodied in the style. One of the questions that emerges in these novels is about the nature of truth. Can we still know truth by sensing as a direct experience (pure human perception) or are we closer to the truth using perception modified by what we know? Then how are these ways of using perception modified by scientific devices? In addition to perception, she also discusses the involvement of technology in memory. The core of the book is a detailed analysis of the three text in which she shows how these works can be interpreted in these new ways. In the final chapter there is a good summary of her thesis.

For me, and I think for many of the readers of Leonardo, one of the values of her analysis is to provide a backdrop for contemporary debates about the influence of more recent developments such as interactive computer and web based technologies, on our perceptions. Is it reasonable to suggest that there is a logical extension of what she sees as the essence of modernism and the concerns of contemporary technologically based art work?

I am not a specialist in literary theory and so I will not comment personally on the place that the book might have in that literature. However, the comments on the cover suggest a very positive contribution to literary theory of the 20th century.

As a visual artist and visual perceptual psychologist, I was struck by the parallel in time frames between the development of experimental psychology and the modernist period. Wilhelm Wundt established the first formal psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, although there were others who were doing experimental psychology before that. Central to their work was the scientific analysis of perception. A dominant method of inquiry was introspection. The attempt was to systematize the self reports of one's sensory experience under controlled conditions of observation. A bit later, in the 1920's and 1930's there was the rise of behaviorism in America, which included a rejection of introspective methods, but this was largely an American phenomenon initially, and the older style psychology lingered on in Europe. While there are accounts of influences from psychology on the visual arts, it would be interesting to know more about possible relationships between this early introspective psychology and the development of modernist literature.

On the negative side, I found the language often rather overblown at times. Simpler and more direct sentence structure would have improved the force of the arguments. Also there is a factual error. On page 63, line 4 the author says that Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the stereoscope. He did develop a later form of the stereoscope, but it was Charles Wheatstone who is credited with the initial invention in 1833.

Overall, 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. !