The Senses of Modernism : Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics /

Danius's historical analysis of the complex relationship of technology to literary/aesthetic modernism (emphasizing the years 1880-1930) provides a new and challenging view of high classical modernism. Technological influences involving especially the eye and ear strongly affected avant-garde movements such as futurism, cubism, vorticism, and surrealism. Influential technological events involve, for example, "phonography, chronophotography, cinematography, telephony, electricity, and technologies of speed." Danius (Uppsala Univ., Sweden) includes background inquiry ranging from that of Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche to Bergson, Eagleton, and Foucault. In the body of the study she focuses on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses (the last of which includes and thematizes the technological events that Mann and Proust dealt with in infant form). Danius bases her observations and conclusions on a solid survey of past critical thought; 37 pages of detailed notes and a 13-page index make the study especially useful for advanced scholars. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students; faculty and researchers. W. B. Warde Jr. University of North Texas