Other Synaesthesia

Susan Bernstein is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University. Her previous books include Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire and Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Against Bouba and Kiki1. Synaesthesia and Community2. Synaesthetic Reading: Liszt's Double Vision3. Baudelaire's Synaesthesia4. Nietzsche, Wagner, and "Demonic Communicability" 5. The Unworking of Synaesthesia in Joris-Karl Huysmans's Rebours6. Correspondances: Between Baudelaire and HeideggerA Note on RhythmNotesBibliographyIndex

"In proposing that synaesthesia should be studied as a discursive dynamic rather than a physiological process, Bernstein's book sharply distinguishes itself from the existing scholarship on the topic, which has primarily tried to use empirical research on a neurological condition to explain aesthetic phenomena. Her original argument facilitates new insights into several major modern authors, allows for the elaboration of innovative conceptions of interconnectivity and relationality, and invites a broad-based reassessment of the ideas about language informing interdisciplinary work in the contemporary humanities. In design and execution, The Other Synaesthesia testifies to the critical power of a tradition of German and French literary theory and philosophy that is often neglected in contemporary Anglo-American letters." — Jan Mieszkowski, author of Crises of the Sentence