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Christian Wehr: Poetic and Media-Oriented Perception in Post-Romantic Modernism
Poetic and Media-Oriented Perception in Post-Romantic Modernism
(p. 131 – 146)

Christian Wehr

Poetic and Media-Oriented Perception in Post-Romantic Modernism
From Baudelaire to Buñuel

PDF, 16 pages

  • gaze
  • history of science
  • physiology

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Christian Wehr

studied French and English literature, musicology, and economics at the University of Munich, in France and in Latin America. From 1996 to 2004, he was an assistant professor at the University of Munich, and from 2004 to 2013 a full professor of French and Spanish at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt as well as the director of the Institute of Latin American Studies. Since 2013, he has been a professor of Spanish and French at the University of Würzburg.
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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