Sensation and Shifting Perspective
This session brings together literary studies and the study of human sensation to question how literature acts as a representation or conduit of sensory knowledge. How can literature challenge our perspectives through unconventional representations of sensation? What are sensory aesthetics? What role do the senses play in eliciting feeling? How can recentering sensation open new pathways and epistemologies of identity and difference? The study of literature and sensation is particularly fertile grounds for the study of perspective: how do our senses shape our perspective? How does the separation of the senses into five distinct categories, as is it commonly depicted, foreclose possibilities for more complex depictions of human experience?