Overview

Art = New Vision. This formula shaped the avant-garde. With moving images abruptly expanding the boundaries of the visible world, new printing techniques triggering a pictorial turn in graphic art, and literature becoming almost inseparable from visual media, we still regard the avant-garde as heyday for modernism's obsession with the eye. But what are the blind spots of this optocentrism? Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing, and handcrafting, this study examines key scenes of tactile interaction between subject and artifact. Hand movements, manual maneuvers and manipulations challenge optics and expose the crises of a visually dominated perspective on the arts. The readings of this book call for a revision of an optically obscured aesthetics and poetics to include haptic experience as an often overlooked but pivotal part of the making, as well as the perception, of literature and the arts.

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9781644697078

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Reviews

Instead of offering merely an itemized listing and a categorization of the major themes and motifs of representative works that focus on gestures and palpability, the author selectively examines a remarkable variety of works by artists, writers, dramatists, theorists, actors, and filmmakers... to advance an alternative conceptual framework for formulating a philology of the hand. Eight sweeping chapters examine profuse examples of the avant-garde's use of the hand in relationship to speech, writing, theater, labor, and tactile text experiments. (...) Highly recommended. - K. Rosneck, University of Wisconsin-Madison, CHOICE 60, no. 1 (September 2022)

Author Information

Susanne Strätling teaches comparative literature with a special focus on East European literatures at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research spans from Baroque aesthetics to contemporary media with a special focus on the poetics of the Russian avant-garde.

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