Sensible Worlds

In my dissertation Sensible Worlds: Collective Perception in 18th-Century German Literature I am uncovering how narrative in sensibility literature is propelled less by individual identity and will than by perception itself, understood as a collective and socially embedded process. Traditionally, sensibility literature has been treated as the expression of the emergence of the individual of sensibility who embodies a superior ability to discern, especially in the realm of aesthetics and of the social. My research redistributes agency away from the individual and towards collective modes of perception emerging in the 18th century. Over the course of the century, the senses took on new roles around analyzing art with the creation of the field of aesthetics, around understanding the world through the sciences with the rise of empiricism as well as around the visual imagination of the nation in the field of cartography. In sensibility literature, I argue, it is these emerging ways of discerning the world that determine the fate of the individual by impacting their relational positionality. New ways of looking and feeling in relation to the arts, nature and geography challenge previous categories and behaviors ingrained in 18th-century German society, such as those surrounding social class, gender and even species.