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Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science by David Sweeney Coombs (review)
Ist Teil von
Victorian Review, 2020-04, Vol.46 (1), p.132-135
Ort / Verlag
Edmonton: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2020
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION eBooks)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Beginning with a reference to Benjamin Morgan's compelling claim that "Victorians read books with their bodies" and Nicholas Dames's argument that "physiology was the metalanguage of nineteenth-century novel theory" (qtd. in Coombs 15), Coombs's first chapter unsettles the definition of reading. "The modern museum is in fact defined by a constitutive tension between description and acquaintance" (112), between label and the experience of the art object itself. For Lee, "description, here [in the labels of the museum], is a kind of graffiti" (115) that undervalues the work of art itself, which Lee sees as "a language needing no interpreters, no dictionaries" (qtd. in 114). Rather than "reference overwhelm[ing] sense" (137) (as Lee experienced with labels in the museum space), instrumental music is non-referential, allowing for a focus on our sense of music and its form.