Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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.

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 body. 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.

One of the texts poised firmly in the pantheon of the modernist canon, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway also wins a place in many feminists' revisions of that canon-honored by varied critics for its narrative experimentation, its lyric modality, its investment in unity, and its provocative inquiries into the nature of community, art, sanity, war, marriage, and sensuality. Skin's eclipses in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway Materializing invisibility as x-ray technology : skin matters in Ralph Ellison's Invisible man Skin harvests : automation and chromatism in Thomas Pynchon's "The secret integration" and Gravity's rainbow Scratching the sensory surface in Kathy Acker's Empire of the senseless. This book investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory and cultural criticism. Looks at the figurative use of skin in the works of Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker. First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company