CFP: Science and the Senses (1789-1914)

Special Issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
Science and the Senses (1789-1914)

According to John Locke, the senses are man’s only connection to the
outside world. It is through sensual experience that man acquires
knowledge about that world. Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands
the Muse (1949) first established how many philosophers and poets
used the camera obscura as a model for explaining the processes of
human understanding; and, she stressed that even if the body was
considered the centre of all human experience, the mind within it was
perceived as at one remove from any original phenomena.  This visual
model for understanding the relationship between sensory perception
and the mind has been extended by Jonathan Crary in the highly
influential Techniques of the Observer (1990).

Romanticists and Victorianists have responded extensively to Crary's
arguments about the various technological models of vision with the
result that visual culture and the gaze (whether masculine,
scientific or otherwise) are quite well studied in these periods.
However, one of the crucial arguments in Crary's work that is less
well-responded to is the newly scientific centring of the origin of
vision—as well as the other senses—within the human body.  As the
developing study of physiology came to this conclusion in the early
nineteenth century, it was not only the visual sense, but also
hearing, touch, taste and smell that became newly subjective,
unstable and temporal. This process had crucial implications for the
formation of subjectivity as well as the conceptualisation of the
body itself.

This special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net will
explore two primary questions. First, how does this scientific and
industrial mechanisation of the senses influence conceptions of
subjectivity? For example, if models of perception draw on optical
technologies to explain vision and sight, does the conception of what
it means to be human change accordingly? Secondly, if sensory
perception, when science locates it in the human body, becomes
unstable, unpredictable and temporary, how might this formulation
provide a base for resistance to this mechanisation? If sensory
perception were as unstable as physiology suggested, then the
codification of the senses could only predict and control humans and
societies to a limited degree.

We hope to put the ‘other’ senses on par with the visual and are
interested in the interplay between the senses. Articles of 5,000 to
8,000 words should be sent to Sibylle Erle
(sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk) and Laurie Garrison
(lgarrison@lincoln.ac.uk) by 15 January 2008.


Possible topics might include:

• The senses, their representation and the aesthetic effects thereof in
• the discourses on scientific, medical, cultural and literary thought
• Advances and new developments in the mechanisation of the senses
• On the cusp of Romanticism: the senses and their place in the
• Enlightenment project
• The senses and racial science and/or primitivism
• Chemically altering the senses or sensual perception
• Optics, the training and altering of vision in astronomy
• The senses and the study of physiology
• Artificial stimulation of the senses
• Literary interpretations of any of these issues
• Technologies of sound
• Photography
• Taste
• Smell
• Hysteria or neurasthenia and the senses
• Miasma