Tactile Poetics

Touch and Contemporary Writing
A new critical perspective on the relationship between text and tact in 20th- and 21st-century literature and theory
While the field of haptic aesthetics has received significant critical interest in recent years, the intimate connection between touching and writing remains neglected. Contributing to current debates in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between text and tact. Through close readings of authors such as John Berger, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Carson, Siri Hustvedt, and Michael Ondaatje, the volume proposes a theory of ‘tactile poetics’ in order to examine the co-implication of touch and writing in a range of genres including the novel, poetry, short fiction, autobiography and film. Drawing on insights from Didier Anzieu, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Luc Nancy, Tactile Poetics examines the ‘skin-effects’ of language and the ‘law of tact’ that always interrupts contact. Celebrating the intersections between creative and critical writing and exploring diverse literary textures, this book deviates from grasping and licking to false hands and phantom limbs, considering the effects of spectral contact on how we ‘hand on’ ways of thinking about reading and writing.

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