Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology by Allyson C. Demaagd

Reviewed by: Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology by Allyson C. Demaagd Abbie Garrington Demaagd, Allyson C. Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022. 190 pp. $85.00 hardcover. In the 1895 English translation of Degeneration, Max Nordau asks, “What saintly legend is as beautiful as the life of an inquirer who spends his existence bending over a microscope, almost without bodily wants” (36). The selection of this quotation indicates Allyson DeMaagd’s talent for identifying images and scenes of rich potential interest to her reader. Nordau’s words also—in their presentation of the scientific patriarch, remarkably free of the burdens of the body—draw together matters of gender, technology, and the senses, the three abiding themes of DeMaagd’s book Dissensuous Modernism. The microscope and subsequent technologies of the early twentieth century come in and out of focus, in fact, in a study more substantially alert to women writers’ determination to unsettle philosophy’s sensory hierarchies, and to adapt linguistic and literary forms (the novel; the autobiography) as they do so. The cinematograph, X-ray, megaphone, gramophone, et al. make intermittent appearances in the book, although a thoroughgoing theory of their contribution to such sensory reordering is not evinced. DeMaagd wants “dissensuous modernism” to stand for a dissident deployment of sensory perception that mingles senses, muddles those presumed hierarchies, discloses desire, and rebels against literary-patriarchal expectations. She draws the term from Jacques Rancière’s “dissensus,” an exploration of the connections between sensory experience, the concept of common sense, and the question of social consensus (3). A rigorous ongoing engagement with Rancière would have formed a welcome spine to the arguments put forward here but, like the microscope, he makes only a couple of appearances, and the promised interrogation of the role of the sensuous in cultures and practices of dissent in the modernist years [End Page 447] never quite emerges. This is in part because the historical and geographical remit of the study remains hazy throughout, with the particularities of sensory rebellion in certain contexts for certain actors at certain times jettisoned in favor of a summarizing habit that—though indicating ambition and reach—collapses detailed argument toward generalization. Nevertheless, DeMaagd is determined to provide insights into the work of H. D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, and does so with great affection—the authors lead the Acknowledgments, addressed on first-name terms. Each chapter focuses on a single book and, with the exception of Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), these are less-studied texts from their respective authors’ oeuvres: H. D.’s HERmione (1981; written 1927), Mina Loy’s Insel (1991; written 1933–36), and Bowen’s Eva Trout (1967). While more substantial references to the body of work of each author would better support claims regarding their distinct dissensuous experiments, these are very welcome additions to the sensory modernist canon, and DeMaagd is an enthusiastic guide. The introduction makes use of well-known works of sensory scholarship by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Mark Paterson amongst others, as well as glancing references to modernist scholarship after the “bodily turn” (Sara Danius), and widely cited studies of modernism and technology (Tim Armstrong). DeMaagd claims that her contribution will be combinatory; an effort to read technology and the senses in modernist women’s writing to produce hitherto overlooked arguments. Her argument in relation to the matter of the senses is also combinatory: while other scholars have worked with single senses, her own project will be “synaesthetic” (8–9). That claim overlooks the blended and cross-modal understanding of the senses already interrogated in supposed single-sense accounts, and a fully realized framework of the synaesthetic does not emerge sufficiently clearly here to provide the promised corrective to sensory modernism as written hitherto. Making use of broad, intentionally transhistorical studies such as those written by Classen and Howe proves an Achilles heel, as DeMaagd’s arguments float free of the early decades of the twentieth century. A possible cause of this seeming vagueness and overreaching (dabbling in queer scholarship, disability studies, and ideas of the nonhuman too) is DeMaagd’s marked habit of addressing...