Suspensions of perception : attention, spectacle, and modern culture / Jonathan Crary.

Main entry:

Crary, Jonathan.

Title & Author:

Suspensions of perception : attention, spectacle, and modern culture / Jonathan Crary.

Publication:

Description:

x, 397 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Series:

October Books

Notes:
"October books."
Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-377) and index.
Modernity and the problem of attention. -- 1879: Unbinding vision. -- 1888: Illuminations of disenchantment. -- 1900: Reinventing synthesis. -- 1907: Spellbound in Rome.

Summary:

"Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century." "Crary approaches these issues through analyses of works by three key modernist painters - Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne - who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representation practices." "This book decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception - in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture."--Jacket.

Resources:
Table of contents
Restricted to MIT Press CogSci subscribers

ISBN:

0262032651 (alk. paper)
9780262032650 (alk. paper)
0262531992
9780262531993

Subject:

Selectivity (Psychology)
Perception.
Attention.
Subjectivity.
Choice (Psychology)
Memory.
Choice Behavior
Sélectivité (Psychologie)
Subjectivité.
Choix (Psychologie)
Mémoire.
memory (psychological concept)
Kunst.
Waarneming.
Selectieve aandacht.
Culturele aspecten.
Cultuurverandering.
Perception Social aspects.
Attention Social aspects.
Civilization, Modern 19th century.
Culture.

Added entries:

October books.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 226938
Call No.: BF378.S45 C73 1999
Status: Available

Location: Library main 226939
Call No.: BF378.S45 C73 1999
Status: Available

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