Empire of the Senses The Sensual Culture Reader [Hardcover]

With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.This is a timely collection that fills an important gap in our archive of the body. Readers and students across many disciplines will find it useful in making sense of a rapidly growing field of knowledge. Veit Erlmann, University of Texas at Austin.

General Introduction
Empires of the Senses

Part I: The Prescience of the Senses
Culture Tunes Our Neurons
1. Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See
2. Marshall McLuhan, Inside the Five Sense Sensorium

Part II. The Shifting Sensorium
Historicizing Perception
3. Susan Stewart, Remembering the Senses
4. Constance Classen, The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and
Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity
5. Carla Mazzio, The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and
Media in Early Modern England
6. Lissa Roberts, The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The 'New'
Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology
7. Alain Corbin, Charting the Cultural History of the Senses

Part III. Sensescapes
Sensation in Cultural Context
8. Constance Classen, McLuhan in the Rainforest:
The SlS%