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This collection of essays by scholars and artists of different disciplines and from different countries is designed to navigate the labyrinth of contemporary aesthetic ideologies with the aim of reassessing how we read - both the way in which texts touch us, and we them.
Theory has transformed texts into mute interlocutors exposed to infinite indeterminacy. While the response to this sense of silence that undermines meaning is often informed by a nostalgia for older notions of close reading, the essays in this volume work towards a re-evaluation of key subjects such as reader, writer and text. The contributors engage with topics such as digital books, popular culture, alternative ways of book-making, visual-verbal collaborations and thematic explorations of the hand in literature.
List of contents
Contents: G. F. Mitrano: Introduction: The Sense of an Equality of Things - Anders Johansson: Touched by Style - Alan Watt: Nietzsche, Bataille, and the Contagion of Philosophy - Dawne McCance: The History of the Hand: Vesalius and Descartes - Shahidha Kazi Bari: Feeling Friendship: Reading Keats's 'This Living Hand' and the Sonnets on the Elgin Marbles - Matt Brim: Teaching the Touching Text; or, How to Lay 'Hands' on Your Students - Andy White: The Return to Orality: Digital Texts and their Impact on Literacy - Richard E. Parent: Interpretation, Navigation, Enactment: Fragmented Narratives and the Play of Reading - Joyce Goggin: A Body Hermeneutic? Corpus Simsi or Reading Like a Sim - Jeff Shantz: Punk as ... Book Making: DIY Theory and Post-Political Politics - Monika Gehlawat: William Carlos Williams and Spring and All: Cubism as a Poetic Event - Gonzalo Tena Brun: Painting Page by Page - Aaron Ritzenberg: Touching the Body, Training the Reader: Emotional Response in Uncle Tom's Cabin - Oliver Taylor: D. H. Lawrence's and Virginia Woolf's Hands - Stefania Consonni: 'A Sculptor's Sense of Words': Don DeLillo's Neo-Realism and the Three-Dimensionality of Narrative Plots.
About the author
The Editors: G. F. Mitrano is the author of
Gertrude Stein: Woman Without Qualities (2005). She works on the intersection of critical thought, literature, and the visual arts. She has taught at the University of Maryland in Europe, the University of Cassino, and currently teaches language and cultural studies courses at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Eric Jarosinski is the author of several articles on links between language, architecture, politics and critical theory. He is currently an assistant professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches modern German literature, culture and theory.
