Synesthesia and Literary Symbolism

Abstract

‘Synesthesia and Literary Symbolism’ broadens the well-established relationship between synesthesia and French Symbolist poetry to include Marinetti's experimentation with sensory blurring. Synesthesia was a recognized medical condition that came to public awareness by the end of the nineteenth-century both because of work made available to the public as well as there being a general sense associated with modernity of nervousness. The Symbolist poets beginning with Baudelaire applied the scientific concept of synesthesia as a metaphor to describe the modern condition. The feeling of the interconnectedness of the body and the city was picked up on most notably by Jules Romains, the founder of Unanimism and by Gustave Kahn and Gian Pietro Lucini, who helped to breathe new life into poetry by freeing verse of its traditional meter. Marinetti followed the example of his predecessors with the invention of the parole in libertà, which allowed for the representation of sensory overload.