Senses-Based Learning

Miami University

Led by:

• Charles Victor Ganelin
• Elisabeth Hodges

In seminar discussions, we will consider the traditional model of the five senses and contemporary society’s altered modalities of sense perception. We will think about what is lost or found in the move inward into technologies and devices and ask what are the broader consequences for humanity as well as literary and artist representation in the changing sensorial landscape?

• Cell phones, iPads, smart phones, computers, and use of the Internet impede active participation in class discussion and their use is prohibited in class unless otherwise directed by your professors. If you have special circumstances that require use of a laptop for taking notes, please communicate this to instructors. This is a discussion-driven class and we expect you to be present, not elsewhere! If a student continuously violates this classroom policy, s/he risk being dropped from the course for disruptive conduct.

Nothing is more essential to human experience than sensation. We see, hear, taste, touch, and feel the world around us. Or do we? Enduring works of philosophy, history, literature, film, and criticism suggest that our sensory engagements are far more complex than they seem. In the current age of growing detachment from the body, devices increasingly mediate sensation. These developments have ignited a scholarly return to the question of the senses across a variety of disciplinary fields from the arts and humanities to the cognitive sciences. This seminar will explore the philosophical and historical foundations of sensory experience and will examine how sensory modes inform literary and artistic expression and how the senses connect, interpret, determine, and sometimes disconnect us from the world of representation. In seminar discussions, we will consider the traditional model of the five senses and contemporary society’s altered modalities of sense perception. We will think about what is lost or found in the move inward into technologies and devices and ask what are the broader consequences for humanity as well as literary and artist representation in the changing sensorial landscape? All students enrolled in the seminar are a part of a special year-long Humanities Center interdisciplinary research program called the Altman program. You will have the opportunity to attend public lectures by distinguished artists, intellectuals, and cultural critics and extend our conversation about the senses outside of the classroom. Course readings and viewing will include a broad range of interdisciplinary materials from secondary texts in philosophy and cultural history (Aristotle, Classen, Howes, Jütte, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Rancière among others) as well as a selection of primary sources that will include novels, plays, short stories, films, animated features, and digital installations (Cervantes, Zayas, Poe, Ocampo, Balzac, Schnabel, Kieslowski, Jonze, Olde Wolbers, etc.).

Content course

University students

• Traditional

Course Syllabus

• Discussion: Philosophies of the Sensorial.

Readings: Aristotle, On the Senses, Books II-III; Sense and Sensibilia

Session 1: Foundations of Sensory Experience

• Discussion: Foundations of Sensory Experience

Readings: Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses, chs. 1-3

Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch, chs. 1-2

• Discussion: Foundations, continues

David Howes, “Introduction: Empire of the Senses”;

Susan Stewart, “Prologue: From the Museum of Touch”; Constance Classen, “The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity”

Altman Lecture: David Howes, “The Evidence of the Senses”

• Discussion: Early Modern Senses: Spain (and beyond)

Readings: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (selections in English)

Steven Wagschal, “The Smellscape of Don Quixote: A Cognitive Approach”

Charles Ganelin, “Don Quixote as Museum”

• Discussion: A (Proto-) Feminist Take on the Early Modern Senses

Readings: María de Zayas: Tale 5, “Innocence Punished,” from The

Disenchantments of Love

(Optional) Heather Young, ch. 6 “María de Zayas and the Fragrance of a Woman’s Space”

(Optional) Lisa Vollendorf, “Fleshing Out Feminism in Early Modern Spain: María de Zayas’s Corporeal Politics”

• Discussion: Early Modern Senses: France (and beyond)

Readings: Michel de Montaigne “Of Smells” (1580)

René Descartes, Dioptrique (1637)

Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch, “Perception Everywhere”, ch. 3

• Discussion: Phenomenology of the Senses

Readings: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”

Section 2: Sensing Difference: Visual, Fictional, Real

• Discussion: Moving Toward Modernity

Readings: Sigmund Freud “The Uncanny”

Edgar Allen Poe: “The Tell-tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”

• Discussion: (Wo)men on the Edge

Readings: Emilia Pardo Bazán, “Torn Lace”; Horacio Quiroga, “The Dead Man”

• Discussion: Why Sense? A Fold in the Flesh of the World

Readings: David Bordwell, Glossary of Film Terms from Film Art Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts (excerpt, tbd)

Viewings: Spike Jonze “Her” (2013)

• Discussion: Jonze’s visual interiority

Readings: Donald Ihde, “Inner Speech” Listening and Voice

• Discussion: The Sound of Others

Readings: Joseph Kickasola, “Kieslowski’s Musique concrete”

Viewing: Krzysztof Kieslowski, The Double Life of Veronica (1991)

• Discussion: Sound, Image, Sense

Readings: Laura Marks, “Thinking Multisensory Culture”

(Optional) Georgina Evans, “Imagination and the Senses”

Viewing: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Blue (1993)

Section 3: Theater(s) of the Sensual

• Discussion: Food

Readings: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, chs. 1 and 4;

Viewings: Gabriel Axel, Babette’s Feast (1987)

• Discussion: Sense and the Genuine

Readings: Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Touch and the Experience of the Genuine”; “The Wreckage of Time and the Persistence of Things: Preserving the Value of Genuineness”

Altman Lecture: Carolyn Korsmeyer “Tasting the Past”

(Optional) – Pouring Tea “In the Next Room”, Patterson Place 4-6pm

**Interactive salon discussion with cast of Miami University’s production of In the Next Room about the history of Victorian ideals, scientific innovation, and cultural practice over tea and snacks

• Discussion: Touching

Readings: Sarah Ruhl, In the Next Room

Michel Foucault, “We, ‘Other Victorians’” The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

• Discussion: Discussion of the play & Foucault

Readings: Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis” The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1.

Gates Abegglen Theater (Miami U), Sarah Ruhl, In the Next Room

**Attend performance of Sarah Ruhl’s play and participate in talkback with dramaturgs

Section 4: Contemporary Ways to Sense

• Discussion: The Sensory Life of Things

Readings: Francis Ponge, The Nature of Things

Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things” Vibrant Matter

• Discussion: Haptic Visuality

Readings: Laura Marks “Preface,” The Skin of the Film

Tarja Laine, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as Emotional Event”

Viewings: Julian Schnabel, “Diving Bell & the Butterfly” (2007)

Altman Lecture: Margaret Livingstone “What Art Can Tell Us about the Brain”

• Discussion: Post-Sense?

Readings: Silvina Ocampo, “The Velvet Dress,” “Isis” (“Mimoso,” “Lovers,” “The Expiation,” and “Sheets of Earth” included as suggested readings by Ocampo.)

• Readings: Isabel Allende, “The Judge’s Wife,” “Tosca”
• Discussion: Knowing and unknowing

Readings: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, part one

Honoré de Balzac, Unknown Masterpiece

• Discussion: Knowing and unknowing (continuation)

Readings: Borges, “The Ethnographer”; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, part two

Altman Lecture: Steven Matijcio “Making Sense in, and of, Contemporary Art”

• Discussion: Seeing, Sensing, Remembering

Readings: Saskia Olde Wolbers, Screenplays for short films (via email attachment)

Viewing: Saskia Olde Wolbers, “Trailer,” “Placebo,” and “Pareidolia”

Evaluation:

• Participation: 25% (includes attendance, active participation in discussion, attending two Altman lectures, and submitting a one-page reaction paper after each lecture to Catherine Tetz, our graduate assistant)
• Writing Assignments: 25% (four two-three-page reaction papers due 9/10; 10/1; 10/22; 11/17)
• Final presentation: 10%
• Abstract & Bibliography: 10% (polished research proposal 2-3 pages with bibliography)
• Final Paper: 30% (final research paper of 12-15 pages, approx. 3600-4500 words)

Books:

• Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Polity, 2004)
• Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflectionson Photography (Hill & Wang, 2010)
• Honoré de Balzac, Unknown Masterpiece (NY Review, 2001)
• Sarah Ruhl, In the Next Room (Theater Communication Group, 2010)
• Coursepack of articles at Oxford Copy Shop