Philosophical studies of the interpretation of sensory information have emphasized the central role of senses in the body’s experience of the world as well as highlighting the plurality and overlap in one’s sensory responses to it. This chapter investigates how far such concepts of experiencing space through a multisensory lens are valid for the ancient Roman villa residences of mainland Italy. Sensory responses to the Roman house have previously been restricted to examining sightlines within and outside the house, as well as movement and access within it. When we consider Pliny’s descriptions of his villas, Vitruvius’ guidance on developing a villa, or Seneca’s description of Scipio’s villa, however, it becomes clear that these residences could affect numerous sensorial responses. As such, foregrounding vision and movement above other senses experienced in the Roman domestic realm risks providing only a partial understanding of life in these residences. This chapter proposes the application of further theoretical frameworks, such as soundscapes and smellscapes, for studying the villa.

“Paris Encountered” is concerned with Joyce’s first period in Paris in 1902 and 1903. The chapter reads chronologically works that have been addressed primarily under the aspect of their later appearance in Joyce’s works: Poem XXXV from Chamber Music, which Joyce sent on a photo-postcard from Paris to Dublin; his aesthetic essay and notes on Aristotle and Hegel in the Paris/Pola Notebook held at the National Library of Ireland; and the short piece of prose poetry later known as Epiphany 33. Drawing upon new sensory studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Paris, “Paris Encountered” uncovers Joyce’s preoccupation with sensation in this period. It argues that his writing undergoes a crucial evolution as he moves from his declaration in the aesthetic essay that art must banish desire and reestablish the autonomy of the intellect to a writing that undercuts objective observation and judgment with an indiscriminate and ineluctable sensory permeation. Necessary for this evolution are the new literary forms developed by Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Émile Zola to address the sensory impact of contemporary Paris as well as Joyce’s discovery of pseudo-Aristotle’s Problems, an unsystematic, zetetic text that models a radically open-ended inquiry into the body and the mind understood as consubstantial, porous, and processual.

The introduction reads Yeats’ record of his meeting with Joyce in 1902 and uncovers in Joyce’s declaration of his intention to write prose poetry an unacknowledged echoing of Baudelaire’s idea for prose poétique. It explores the Parisian context of Baudelaire’s ambition to develop a new kind of materially displaced thinking and considers it in relation to New Materialism: While neo-materialist approaches would shift emphasis and agency from a Cartesian subject to the world of matter, Baudelaire’s “things think through me, or I through them” retains a vital openness. It is here that I introduce the concept of Joyce’s sentient thinking, an undoing of the sovereign and dominating subject that offers new possibilities of cooperative co-being. The introduction theorizes Joyce’s exploration of a lived aesthetic practice with reference to accounts of subjectivity such as Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject (2016) and works on reason under capitalism such as Martin Jay’s Reason After Its Eclipse (2016).