Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing

About the Book

This book contends that the haptic sense - combining touch, kinaesthesis and proprioception - was first fully conceptualised and explored in the modernist period, in response to radical new bodily experiences brought about by scientific, technological and psychological change.
How does the body's sense of its own movement shift when confronted with modernist film? How might travel by motorcar disorientate one sufficiently to bring about an existential crisis? If the body is made of divisible atoms, what work can it do to slow the fleeting moment of modernist life? The answers to all these questions and many more can be found in the work of four major writers of the modernist canon - James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson. They suggest that haptic experience is at the heart of existence in the early twentieth century, and each displays a fascination with the elusive sense of touch. Yet these writers go further, undertaking formal experiments which enable their own writing to provoke a haptic response in their readers.
By defining the haptic, and by looking at its role in the work of these major names of modernist writing, this book opens up the field of literary studies to the promise of a haptic-oriented analysis, identifying a rich seam of literary work we can call 'haptic modernism'.
Key Features
Offers a coherent history of ideas of the haptic, tracing their impact on literary innovationAnalyses the transformations of haptic experience in the modernist period, and its roots in developments in mechanised transport, the cinema, contemporary science and the rapidly modernising cityProvides in-depth studies of the work of Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence and Richardson from a new, haptic-oriented perspective, shedding new light on familiar figures of the modernist avant-gardePuts literary experiments with the haptic in the context of work on touch in other fields

Table of Contents:
1. Haptic Modernism; Modernist Manicures; Histories of the Haptic; Going to the Feelies; Excursus: Pygmalion; 2. James Joyce’s Epidermic Adventures; Masturbatory Modernism; Smashed to Atoms; The Blind Stripling; Encyclodermia; 3. Virginia Woolf, Hapticity, and the Human Hand; Palm Reading; Motorcar Kinaesthetics; Carpe Diem; 4. Dorothy Richardson and the Haptic Reader; The Licking Eye; Scenes of Reading; Tactile Pilgrimages; 5. D. H. Lawrence: Blind Touch in a Visual Culture; The ‘Unimpeachable Kodak’; St Mawr’s Dark Eye; Back to the Blind; 6. Horrible Haptics; A Five-Fingered Beast; Pianists and Surgeons; Appendix: Tactile Terminologies

About the Author :
Abbie Garrington is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Durham University.

Review :
This is a beautifully controlled study of literary hands as they write, point, stroke, trace, and tease. At the same time it is an expansive, audacious and supremely well-handled study of what it means to touch and be touched, to feel and be felt. Haptic Modernism establishes Abbie Garrington as one of the most compelling voices in the rapidly-evolving critical conversation about literature and ‘the business of the bodily’.In a series of revelatory close readings, Garrington parses gestural sign languages in the work of Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence. Familiar texts take on startlingly unfamiliar shapes when we keep in mind Woolf’s hand held out to the palm-reader and Lawrence’s extraordinary affirmation that his hand ‘flickers with a life of its own’. Garrington’s prose is alive too. She writes with infectious energy, lyrical precision, and a certain sly ingenuity that allows her to seize hold of ideas lurking far beneath the skin of some of modernity’s most challenging texts. Knowing that language matters in ‘making manifest’ the work of the hands, she takes us on a linguistic adventure. Rarely is the glossary at the end of a book particularly diverting. The dictionary of tactile terms offered here is, like the whole book, both a joy and an education. Haptic Modernism is a compelling and adroitly written first monograph. Haptic Modernism is fundamentally generative, opening up new domains of scholarship on the topic of modernism and the history of the senses. Touch is the most neglected sense in literary studies. In this remarkable book, Abbie Garrington makes good that neglect and opens up a whole new field of research. Haptic Modernism offers original interpretations of Joyce, Woolf, Richardson, and Lawrence and introduces us to a radical understanding of bodily responses to the technologies of modernity.