
Tactile Poetics
Touch and Contemporary Writing
Sarah Jackson(Author)
Edinburgh University Press
Published on 7. June 2015
Book
Hardback
176 pages
978-0-7486-8531-8 (ISBN)
Description
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, Helene 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.
Reviews / Votes
ground-breaking * Forum for Modern Language Studies Volume 52, Issue 2 * Tactile Poetics takes excellent care of the intellectual and imaginative possibilities of its subject. Jackson's lucid, subtle engagement with touch and associated topics combines a poet's sensitivity, scholar's rigour and thinker's curiosity. Her book belongs alongside classic studies by Anzieu, Connor and Nancy. -- Dr Sarah Wood * University of Kent and Guild of Psychotherapists * Tactile Poetics?is an original and compelling study. It is also, in its singularly gentle manner, a work of pressing importance. Interweaving lucid and thought-provoking expositions of Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy and others, with deft and inventive readings of an adventurous range of recent fictional and poetic texts, Jackson's book shows how the subject of touch is at the heart of contemporary writing and theory. -- Professor Nicholas Royle * University of Sussex *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
4 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 158 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
440 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7486-8531-8 (9780748685318)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
06/2015
Edinburgh University Press
€92.49
Available for download

E-Book
06/2015
Edinburgh University Press
€0.00
Available for download
Person
Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Arts and Environment and Vice Chancellor's Fellow at Northumbria University. Working at the intersections of literature, art and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice, her books include Pelt (2012; awarded the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry 2013); Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (2015); and Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (2023). Bringing together creative and critical practice, her current work focuses on geopoetics, displacement and sound.
Content
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Each Word of Skin; 1. Writing Bodies: Hustvedt's Textual Skin; 2. Expeausition: Ondaatje's Skin-Effects; 3. The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.; 4.So Close: Writing that Touches; 5. Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos; 6. Hand Delivered: From A to X; 7. Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities; 8. Phantom Limbs: Bowen's 'Hand in Glove'; Bibliography