Skin

by Benthien, Claudia

• ISBN13: 9780231125024
• ISBN10: 023112502X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

"Only skin deep," "getting under one's skin," "the naked truth": metaphors about the skin pervade the language even as physical embellishments and alterations -- tattoos, piercings, skin-lifts, liposuction, tanning, and more -- proliferate in Western culture. Yet outside dermatology textbooks, the topic of skin has been largely ignored.This important cultural study shows how our perception of skin has changed from the eighteenth century to the present. Claudia Benthien argues that despite medicine's having penetrated the bodily surface and exposed the interior of the body as never before, skin, paradoxically, has become a more and more unyielding symbol. She examines the changing significance of skin through brilliant analyses of literature, art, philosophy, and anatomical drawings and writings. Benthien discusses the semantic and psychic aspects of touching, feeling, and intellectual perception; the motifs of perforated, armored, or transparent skin; the phantasma of flaying; and much more through close readings of such authors as Kleist, Hawthorne, Balzac, Rilke, Kafka, Plath, Morrison, Wideman, and Ondaatje. Myriad images from the Renaissance, anatomy books, and contemporary visual and performance art enhance the text.

Author Biography

Claudia Benthien is assistant professor of German at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Table of Contents

Preface to the American Edition	vii
The Depth of the Surface
Introduction	1	(16)
Boundary Metaphors
Skin in Language	17	(20)
Penetrations
Body Boundaries and the Production of Knowledge in Medicine and Cultural Practices	37	(26)
Flayings
Exposure, Torture, Metamorphoses	63	(32)
Mirror of the Soul
The Epidermis as Canvas	95	(16)
Mystification
The Strangeness of the Skin	111	(22)
Armored Skin and Birthmarks
The Imagology of a Gender Difference	133	(12)
Different Skin
Skin Colors in Literature and the History of Science	145	(18)
Blackness
Skin Color in African - American Discourse	163	(22)
Hand and Skin
Anthropology and Iconography of the Cutaneous Senses	185	(18)
Touchings
On the Analogous Nature of Erotic, Emotive, and ``Psychic'' Skin Sensations	203	(18)
Teletactility
The Skin in New Media	221	(14)
Conclusion	235	(8)
Notes	243	(14)
Bibliography	257	(22)
Index	279