Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• General Introduction Empires of the Senses
• Part I The Prescience of the Senses "Culture Tunes Our Neurons"
• 1 "The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See"
• 2 "Inside the Five Sense Sensorium"
• Part II The Shifting Sensorium Historicizing Perception
• 3 "Remembering the Senses"
• 4 "The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity"
• 5 "The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early Modern England"
• 6 "The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The 'New' Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology"
• 7 "Charting the Cultural History of the Senses"
• Part III Sensescapes Sensation in Cultural Context
• 8 "McLuhan in the Rainforest: The Sensory Worlds of Oral Cultures"
• 9 "Consciousness as 'Feeling in the Body': A West African Theory of Embodiment, Emotion and the Making of Mind
• 10 "Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Towards a Sensuous Epistemology of Space"
• 11 "The Tea Ceremony: A Symbolic Analysis"
• 12 "Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: Temiar Songs of a Changing World
• 13 "Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong"
• Part IV The Aestheticization of Everyday Life Aestheticization Takes Command
• 14 "A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau"
• 15 "Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture"
• 16 "Hyperaesthesia, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism"
• 17 "Under the Jaguar Sun"
• 18 "Michel Serres' Five Senses"
• 19 "Darwin's Disgust"
• Part V The Derangement of the Senses The Senses Disordered
• 20 "Strindberg's 'Deranged Sensations'"
• 21 "Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World of a Shelter for the 'Homeless Mentally Ill'"
• 22 "Dystoposthesia: Emplacing Environmental Sensitivities"
• Sensory Bibliography Forming Perceptions 50 Ways to Come to Your Senses