The Haptic Arts - by Ronald Schleifer (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This book examines how the sense of touch complements the senses of sight and hearing, expanding notions of "art" and "aesthetics" to include worldly arts such as medicine, nation building, and translation while re-thinking more traditional arts of literature, music, and painting.

Touch is a form of reciprocal interchange - touching always involves being touched in return. It creates a sense of embeddedness in a world that promotes a willingness to take social action, and it heightens concern with spatial perception and metamorphosis with an eye towards transforming experience itself. Focusing on subjects as diverse as Helen Keller, the evolutionary history of the human hand, and practical "haptic" endeavors such as tool-making, The Haptic Arts situates the arts and value within everyday cares and pursuits as tools that extend and strengthen our reach into the world.

Review Quotes

"With wonderful dexterity and warm companionship, The Haptic Arts leads us out of an isolated and goal-driven approach to comprehension and back into the authentic experience of being embedded in a fulfilling world of reciprocity and transformation. The work's advocacy of touch, as a moment and an approach that entails engagement, embodiment and realisation, draws together an absorbing array of examples from art, literature, memoirs, political theory, science and translation; while the caring craft of successive chapters genially performs its own espoused practice of ruminative enrichment and widening understanding. Convincingly demonstrating how even the most austere conceptualization can be underpinned and nurtured by gestural meaning, and in a time of increasing digitalisation of our worldliness, Ronald Schleifer enjoins us here to connect with a more ecumenical vision in which our whole being can celebrate its situatedness and embrace a worldly wisdom." --Seán Hand, Professor of French Studies, University of Warwick, UK

"The Haptic Arts invites us to rethink aesthetics from the ground up. Restoring touch to the center of human experience, Ronald Schleifer shows how art, care, community, and meaning emerge from embodied, worldly engagement. Learned yet generous, this book offers a compelling account of how we come to know, feel, and live through contact with others and with the world. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the humanities, aesthetics, and the forms of knowledge that emerge from lived experience." --Jonathan Kramnick, Maynard Mack Professor of English, Yale University, USA

About the Author