Bertinoro, August 28th - September 4th, 2005

"The Five Senses (not to Mention the Sixth)"

 

 

Lectures, seminars and discussion will focus on the following topics:

1. The relationship between the five senses, their interconnections and the hierarchy imposed on them by the various cultures and historical periods. In particular:

   1. The relationship (synapsis?) between the bodily perceptions through the five senses and the interior life of the mind: conscience, thought, knowledge, memory. Without insisting too much, therefore, on the great spectacle offered by the world to the eyes, by food to taste, by a springtime outing among flowers to smelling, and preferring instead, in the works of literature, the proustian moment: the awakening and the entrance of light through the window that makes us perceive the world as something fresh and new in the morning; a sip of a ptisan or the taste of a madelaine which provoke a sudden alertness in our conscience, a sense of bewilderment and a difficulty to define the sensation, a sudden emergence of remembrance.

   2. The position of prominence taken by sight in the culture of modernity and particularly in the turn between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, with a strong emphasis on the role of the "observer", be it God who looks from high above the actions of human beings or the political power that controls social life or the narrator who governs the narrative strategies or the point of view in the modern novel.

   3. The so-called "dissociation of sensibility" theorized by a number of scholars (T. S. Eliot, W. Ong, M. McLuhan) and taken as the consequence of the arrival of modernity: the end of an harmonious cooperation among the senses (typical of pre-modern societies) and the hegemony of sight on the other senses (typical of modernity).

   4. The possible relationship between the great philosophical interest in the world of the senses in late Eighteenth century (Locke, Condillac, etc.) and the rise and development of the literature of "sensibility", with all its consequences and possible connections: the differentiation of the sexes, the new culture of Romanticism, etc.

   5. Pathological phenomena such as the loss of some of our perceptive capacities (blindness, deafness, etc.) and their consequences on the life of singular persons and on their efforts at establishing communication and knowledge, having in the mind the case of The Story of my Life by Helen Keller.

2. Synaesthesia as a rhetorical and poetical phenomenon and its various practices and functions in the different historical periods.

3. The sixth sense as a form of relationship between bodily perception and imagination or fantastic projection. Its scientific and para-scientific bases. Its presence in the history of cultural and literary tradition.