The Sense of an Interior is a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. The book looks at four famous figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust, and examines the relationship between their work and the spaces where they wrote.
"The Sense of an Interior" is a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. In four beautiful essay-chapters Diana Fuss examines four exemplary figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust. Women and men, gay and straight, European and American, bound together by their gifts as writers, by the special bond between each of them and the space within which they wrote.
But in Diana Fuss's hands we discover something more: while Helen Keller is certainly the most remarkable in her triumph over profound disabilities, each of the other three sustained a disability of their own. Dickinson, who confined herself to the house in Amherst, suffered from periodic bouts of blindness. Freud's famous examining room in Vienna was arranged to compensate for his deafness in one ear. Helen Keller's home in Easton, Connecticut was a world she could master until, with age, even her sense of touch finally failed her. Neurotic Proust, obsessed withsmell, hated the odor of cooking and arranged his apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann to keep him as far as possible from the kitchen.
Illustrated with almost sixty images, many rare, and some never before published, this richly observed book weaves together new understandings of domestic space, creativity, and disability.
"Diana Fuss gives us in The Sense of an Interior a whole range of new ideas about interiority and the senses, subjects ,and objects. Her lovely prose brilliantly captures the affective qualities of architectural spaces. In the process, it de-hierarchizes the senses--primarily of course by deconstructing vision's primacy--but also by helping us pay attention to the neglected senses to complicate, enrich, and reorient our experience. Fuss's book constitutes as strong an argument as can be made for the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and writing." -- Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History, University of Rochester, and author of Melancholia and Moralism
