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

Erica Fretwell's book explores the cultural and aesthetic landscape of feeling in nineteenth-century America by examining the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation. She shows how psychophysics shifted the understanding of feeling from sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience, contributing to the racialization of aesthetics and sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 16 October 2020
Publisher: Duke University Press

Sensory Experiments, by Erica Fretwell, delves into the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theories of sensation to explore 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 comprehensive analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the works of canonical figures such as Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became crucial 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 also sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being that defy the figure of the bourgeois liberal individual. While psychophysics has largely been forgotten, Fretwell argues that its significance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory.

Sensory Experiments, by Erica Fretwell, delves into the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theories of sensation to explore 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 comprehensive analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the works of canonical figures such as Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became crucial 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 also sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being that defy the figure of the bourgeois liberal individual. While psychophysics has largely been forgotten, Fretwell argues that its significance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory.

Weight: 490g
Dimension: 151 x 230 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478010937