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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)
Description: Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Dr. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism (Penn State UP, 2024) traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth.
Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, this book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology...