Touching Literature or the Experience of the Limit

<p><b><i>Touching Literature, or The Experience of the Limit</i></b><b> shows how radical engagements with touch allow literature to transcend boundaries of temporality, mortality and finitude, subjectivity, territorial differences, and the material limits of the artwork itself.</b> Departing from philosophies of touch – proposed by such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous – that call for respecting personal limits, Irving Goh finds that literary works can be more audacious with touch, both testing and transgressing those limits.</p><p>Through readings of various texts – Marcel Proust's<i> In Search of Lost Time</i>, three novels by Clarice Lispector (<i>Passion According to G. H.</i>, <i>Água Viva</i>, and<i> A Breath of Life</i>), and Anthony Doerr's <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i>, as well as Shakespeare's sonnets, the poems of E. E. Cummings, and Ovid's Pygmalion story – Goh contends that being attuned to literary articulations of touch, as well as being sensitive to the experience of being touched by a text, illuminate the urgency of existence not only in the texts in question but also for us readers at a time when personal interactions are increasingly distant and mediated by screens.</p>