Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, human perception was increasingly modeled on the latest developments in electric communication technology, in particular the telegraph and telephone. This paper argues that Henry James's narrative technique of telling a story through the medium of a particular "receiving" or "recording" consciousness reflects the techno-physiological framework by which his contemporaries theorized human sense perception. This paper first documents the linked fin-de-siecle "discourse networks" of electric communication, on the one hand, and medical investigations into perceptual functioning, on the other. Drawing on James's late novel The Ambassadors, the paper argues that we can only fully appreciate James's modernist innovations in narrative perspective once we ground his work in the larger historical shift to analogical models of communication.

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