The classical five senses—and, in many cases, a tendency to focus on single, putatively discrete senses—have played an outsized role in orienting sensorial approaches to literature and culture. Yet the full range of sensory experience exceeds and confounds this framework of five discrete senses. What possibilities for sensory aesthetics and cross-cultural comparison might be opened up by moving beyond the classical five-senses paradigm? As Boaventura de Sousa Santos writers, “sensorial depth based on intersensoriality is not compatible with the rationality of Western modernity, since it puts at stake the linearity, unidirectionality, and unidimensionality of extractivist perception.” In addition to intersensoriality and synaesthesia, how might less studied sensory modalities—for example, insensibility, kinesthesia, interoception, thermoception, and chronoception—shift our approaches to forms, archives, and methodologies? How can literary scholars account for non-Eurocentric conceptions of the senses—for example, ancestrally attuned Kanaka Maoli “sense abilities” (Oliveira) or the Japanese practice of kuuki wo yomu or “reading the air” (Sekimoto)—as well as the interactions and frictions between differently situated ways of sensing? Does Marshall McLuhan’s concept of historically (and technologically) conditioned “sense-ratios”—or proportioned patterns of relation between senses—offer a means of comparing the intersensorial orientations of media, genres, or literary movements?

Moving beyond the Western sensorium, we invite papers that examine understudied sensory modalities that shape and are enframed by literary and cultural production (film, archives, literature, performance, etc.). This seminar is interested in the political, aesthetic, and ethical questions that arise from intersensorial mediations or from engagements with non-canonical sensory modalities. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Literary or cultural figures whose work engages multi- or inter-sensory experiences
• Media or textual practices that challenge Western sensory paradigms
• Artists who conceptualize performance through sensory frameworks
• How sensory experience travels across across languages, genres, or literary-historical time periods
• Methodological possibilities for studying across the senses
• Sensation across scale (from the planetary to the microbial)
• comparative approaches to studying literary sensoria