Touching Literature, or The Experience of the Limit

Touching Literature, or The Experience of the Limit 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. 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.

Through readings of various texts—Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, three novels by Clarice Lispector (Passion According to G. H., Água Viva, and A Breath of Life), and Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, 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.