FYS 63 The Senses, Sensibility, and Society
In 1844, Karl Marx wrote that the “forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” Sound, taste, smell, sight, and touch are as much biological phenomena as they are social, cultural, and historical productions. Researchers are now beginning to understand how social class shaped the soundscape of modernity, how race influenced ideals of odorlessness and “odorous” others, and how experiences of and ideas about touch and taste become gendered. Embodied and sensorial studies offer a new view into the social construction of the sensorium. Yet, sensory studies largely remains marginal within the wider disciplinary field of history. Such is the status of the history of emotions, or “soft history”, as well, a field of study mostly disparaged in contemporary scholarship. But anger, love, fear, disgust, and joy are historical and social artifacts! So this course will invite us to think, sense, and feel about the past and the present through the methods of sensory studies and history of emotions, and participants will write and research about particular senses or emotions in a historical-cultural lens through the seminar.