Sara Danius
Related: Modernism - High Modernism - Modernist literature
The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (2002) - Sara Danius
A remarkable meeting took place one November day in 1929 in Paris between two famous innovators, one in literature, the other in film: James Joyce (1882-1941) and Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948).... The historical meeting ... took place on November 30, 1929, at 2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris 7e, where Joyce had a flat.... As far as is known, Joyce never mentioned this meeting in writing.(Gösta Werner, 1990)
The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (2002) - Sara Danius [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction.
In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time. Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one. --source unidentified, possibly product description
It appears that Sara Danius, in her 2002 book The Senses of Modernism, pinpoints the beginning of modernism to the 1880s, a time when the first commercially available gramophones and phonographs were changing the way people listened to music. She further pinpoints the end of modernism to 1930, which was the beginning of the sound film, changing forever the way people consumed fiction. Her history of modernism is connected to new media that arose during what is sometimes called high modernism: radio, phonograph and cinema.
There is a direct link between high modernism and cinema in an encounter between Sergei Eisenstein and James Joyce.
The stream of consciousness style of modernist literature appears to be indebted to the development of cinema, where narrativity was expressed differently.
The rise of cinema and "moving pictures" in the first decade of the 20th century gave modernism an artform which was uniquely its own.
See also: high modernism - 1880s - 1890s - 1900s - 1910s - 1920s - stream of consciousness - media - senses - cinema