Aesthetic Perception and Embodied Cognition: Art and Literature at the Fin de Siècle
Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism September 1, 2020 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442244.003.0005 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Vernon Lee's writing on 'empathy' and Bernard Berenson's theorisation of 'tactile values' advanced embodied formulations of vision in the late nineteenth century, and that these ideas are important to impressionist and post-impressionist art and literature and can be woven into the history of embodied cognition, changing our understanding of modernist visualities. |
Abstract
The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson developing embodied formulations of vision that put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue. Starting with Vernon Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’ and Berenson’s theorisation of ‘tactile values’, this essay argues for the importance of ideas of embodied perception to impressionist and post-impressionist art and literature, and suggests we can find in late-nineteenth-century aestheticism a colourful thread that needs to be woven into the history of what might now be called embodied cognition. To recognize this is to change our understanding of modernist visualities. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty is called on to help bridge, historically and conceptually, between the work of a group of aesthetes and decadents at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary framework of distributed cognition that is the basis for our project.