Introduction
The form of the news has become a national obsession. Is journalistic objectivity obsolete? Has national discourse fragmented into self-reinforcing echo chambers? Is fake news the problem, or are conspiracy theorists to blame?
These questions are important, but they are ultimately symptomatic of a deeper issue: a universal dissatisfaction with the way the news relates its readers to the world.
Reading the news, we feel despair or impotence about current events. We feel overwhelmed or paralyzed. We feel agony or numbing unreality. These urgent feelings make us forget that, though the news represents the world, it also constructs the world.
SENSATION! is an exhibit that reads the news for its literary and artistic features. How does the news create what we know about the world? How does the news determine how we feel about those events that unfold beyond our immediate sense perceptions? How does the news relate our bodies to the world it represents?
Anne Gross ’25
SENSATION! Reported Bodies in 19th Century American Media was curated by Anne Gross ’25 for the 2025 Senior Exhibit Fellowship project for Yale University Library.
Anne Gross is a Comparative Literature and Philosophy double major. For her, this exhibit is intensely personal. Reading the news makes her feel overwhelmed, anguished, and paralyzed. When she talked with people around her, she found that most felt the same way. But most people attributed these feelings to the events themselves, rather than to the news’s methods of representation.
Anne hopes that the exhibit gives her audience the tools to critically assess what is at stake in different methods of rendering reality. She designed this exhibit to encourage people to see that how the news represents is just as important as what it represents.