Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker

ISBN-13: 9780415940191 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 190 str.

Maureen F. Curtin; Curtin Curtin;Curtin

Opis

Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in 20th century literature, theory and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin likewise figures in the emergence of visual technologies positioned at the heart of the contest between surface depth and, by extension, between Western globalization and identity politics. Skin itself comes into explicit focus, though, only after a half-century of alternating circulation and suppression in American discourses about colour-blindness, during which time colonialism elsewhere had begun to lose its purchase. Skin emerges most spectacularly at the close of this century in body modification practices - especially tattoo - that link visuality to writing and embodiment, urging complex identity politics that hedge against globalization. Nevertheless, even as interventions on the skin characterize the millennial turn, fantasy and science fiction literature and film trumpet skin's passing in the cybernetic age. Similarly feminist theory - otherwise concerned with corporeality - calls for abandoning the skin as a hostile boundary.

O autorze

Maureen F. Curtin