Haptic Modernism
Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing
The first substantial account of the representation of the haptic in literature of the modernist period
Haptic Modernism focuses on areas of sensory experience which were being re-conceptualised in response to technological and scientific innovations in the modernist years: touch, kinaesthesis, proprioception and the vestibular sense. The work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson and D. H. Lawrence is considered in detail alongside non-canonical fictions and scientific, philosophical and journalistic accounts of bodily experiences in the realm of touch and the tactile.
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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
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
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.
