Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker

by Curtin; *

• ISBN13: 9780415940191
• ISBN10: 0415940192
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-12-06
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Out of Touchinvestigates 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
Skin's Eclipses in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway	15	(26)
Materializing Invisibility as X-Ray Technology: Skin Matters in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man	41	(20)
Skin Harvests: Automation and Chromatism in Thomas Pynchon's ``The Secret Integration'' and Gravity's Rainbow	61	(32)
Scratching the Sensory Surface in Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless	93	(26)
Conclusion	119	(12)
Notes	131	(24)
Bibliography	155	(10)
Index	165