Bernard Berenson and tactile values

Lecture in English by Marion Thain

This talk dicusses Berenson’s celebrated theory of ‘tactile values’, its significance for understanding the literary ‘impressionism’ practised in the work of British Decadent poets (with a particular focus on Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde), and the historical significance of all of this for what we now think of as a framework of ‘Distributed Cognition’. 

Professor Marion Thain works on literature, culture and the visual arts at New York University (LSP and English). She has a new book forthcoming in 2016 titled The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity.

Previous book publications include: The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2013); ‘Michael Field’ (1880-1914): Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Poetry of the 1890s (Penguin, 1998; Second Edition).

 

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