Piet Devos

writer and literary theorist

Research

Touched by Surrealism: reflections on a new sensory approach to literature

Saturday 20 December 2014

(Article published in RELIEF 8.2 2014)

In this paper, I discuss a new sensory approach to literature. Literature might be studied in order to trace the perceptual effects of cultural, political and technological transformations. First, I develop a historicizing method, which maps the sensory practices and discourses of a certain period and analyzes their appropriation in contemporaneous literature. Next, I demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach by taking Surrealism as a case study, focusing on the role of touch or 'haptics' in the works of Benjamin Péret. The concluding remarks will serve to hint at the new routes of research which this sensory approach discloses.

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Other items related to the theme Research:

Tardy Presents: Embodied agency in the ‘documental’ poetry of Benjamin Péret and Antonio Porchia

24 February 2019

(Article co-authored with Gys-Walt van Egdom, published in Literature as Document. Eds. Sarah Bonciarelli et al. Pp. 133-148) In this paper, we examine an often overlooked literary tradition, which came to see the act of writing as a way of documenting ‘pure’ embodied agency.

Jacques Lusseyran, entre cécité et lumière

04 January 2019

La première étude consacrée à la vie et l’œuvre exceptionnelles de Jacques Lusseyran vient de paraître aux Éditions Rue d’Ulm.

Dancing Beyond Sight: How blindness shakes up the senses of dance

14 September 2018

(Article published in Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 38 no. 3) In this essay I argue that blindness offers up a most fruitful perspective through which to rethink the visualist aesthetics of dance.

Encuentros con la (a)normalidad: los cuerpos (in)tocables de Pablo Palacio

29 January 2018

(Artículo publicado en Cuerpos ilegales. Ed. Nanne Timmer. Pp. 231-259) Al estudiar la obra de Pablo Palacio, analizo el vínculo estrecho entre el tacto y la constitución normalizadora del sujeto moderno.

Sonic Boundary Objects: Negotiating disability, technology, and simulation

10 November 2016

(Article co-authored with Florian Grond, published in Digital Creativity: health and wellbeing, pp. 1-17) In this article, we discuss the use of binaural sound recordings as a tool to negotiate between blind and sighted experiences of an urban soundscape.

‘Estamos en el ciclo de los nervios’: las imágenes electrificadas de Huidobro y la reconsideración científica de la visión

01 December 2012

(Ponencia publicada en las Actas del congreso ‘Imágenes y realismos en América Latina’, Universidad de Leiden) En varios manifiestos el vanguardista chileno Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) comparó la imagen poética con una 'chispa' eléctrica y el poema con una batería cargada.