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

Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker
ISBN-10
113537371X
ISBN-13
9781135373719
Series
Out of Touch
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
198
Language
English
Published
2013-09-13
Publisher
Routledge
Author
Maureen F. Curtin

Description

Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory, and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin figures in the cultural effect of changes in visual technologies, a development argued by critics to be at the heart of the contest between surface and depth and, by extension, Western globalization and identity politics. The skin has a complex history as a metaphorical terrain over which ideological wars are fought, identity is asserted through modification as in tattooing, and meaning is inscribed upon the human being. Yet even as interventions on the skin characterize much of this history, fantasy and science fiction literature and film trumpet skin's passing in the cybernetic age, and feminist theory calls for abandoning the skin as a hostile boundary.

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