You could argue that literature is about nothing but the senses. A story requires animate beings, settings, objects (trees, flowers, cooking, smoke, things that stroke or pinch). The senses are always there. Even language is tangible. If we hear it spoken or sung, it has the substantiality of sound. Writing is silent, but it is tangible as well. It has the materiality of the medium it is written in: ink, graphite, the traces of a chisel on stone, paint, neon, yellow lines on the street. If we are reading letters on a monitor we have the substantiality of the laptop, kindle or cell phone in hand, old-style display or touch screen. It's odd that we would have to defend the sensory world, but we have the ability to ignore it. As analysts and critics, we are more comfortable with meanings. They’re always easy to find, and they can be important: historical background, biography, patterns of imagery, moral advice, etc. But we’ve learned to look past the world of the sensory. It's become the thing right in front of us that we don't quite see any longer, like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe's influential story by the same name, the elephant in the room. The project of this book is to restore that balance, to establish building blocks which can help us feel our way toward a criticism which puts the sensory and material world in the foreground.

We are not alone. In Empire of the Senses, a book which argues for the importance of the tactile world, ‘a full-bodied understanding of culture and experience’, David Howes makes a similar case with a host of eloquent witnesses. An opening move in his introduction is of particular interest to us because it warns us against naive polemics. We mislead ourselves if we make experience into mutually exclusive categories. The alternative is to eliminate ‘the imaginary divide between thinking and feeling. If we hold … that the mind is necessarily embodied and the senses mindful, then a focus of perceptual life is not a matter of losing our minds but of coming to our senses’. In what follows we will ground ourselves in that possibility.