Book contents
Appendix: Tactile Terminologies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
Summary
Many of the following terms are central to contemporary scholarship addressing touch and the tactile and/or the haptic. Others are central to the present study in particular. All are fascinating – in their etymologies, in the experiences they describe, and in the conversations they establish about the touch-point between language and somatic experience itself. This appendix is a provocation to further investigation, rather than an exhaustive list of definitions. My sources are those listed in my bibliography, cited if quoted directly.
Automatic writing A scriptive practice poised at the interstices between spirit-summoning, allowing one's body to function as a machine, invoking the powers of chance and contingency and, crucially, exploring the connection between manual practices and human agency. The automatic hand and the severed hand are conceptual bedfellows (see Chapter 6).
Blessed blindness A notion of long provenance in which blindness is read as indicating piety, a non-sexual aversion to the flesh, closeness to God, and selection for spiritual insight beyond the province of the eye.
Blindness The absence of sight, either literal/physical, or metaphorical/ psychological. Useful to the history of the haptic since the blind man is thrown upon his haptic resources, and the cortical adaptations of blind figures make the haptic aspects of their sensoria particularly acute.
Brand The imposition of a mark upon the flesh, connoting identity and/ or ownership, and useful here in its suggestion that the skin can be inscribed and, subsequently, read.
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- Information
- Haptic ModernismTouch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing, pp. 183 - 187Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013