ABSTRACT
Tristram Shandy is full of surprising incidents that exercise both the mind and the senses. Sterne was fascinated by how things developed, how they could best be understood if studied, taken apart and put back together—in essence, probed for what made them “tick”. Synaesthesia is a Greek word meaning literally “union of the senses,” derived from syn meaning “union” and aisthesis meaning “sensation.” The history of synaesthesia, although notable for being something of a curiosity in the eighteenth century, actually extends well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where it appears in various art and literary movements. Semiotics has reinvigorated recent work on synaesthesia by allowing physicians and scientists to examine metaphors in order to gain awareness of the neurological condition by mapping its rhetorical behavior.
