This paper offers a close reading of a "scene" from Alice James's diary, in which she remembered witnessing the authentication of her own will, while being confined to her bed after what nineteenth-century medical science would have diagnosed as a hysterical fit. At the centre of this scene lies a fascinating mention of “Miss James’s hand,” which designates simultaneously a body part and the style of her handwriting. Querying the legibility of hand and will, body and text, James moves us from a critique of the manipular politics of touch that the others witnesses to the scene engage in, to the counterpolitics of feeling she strives to deploy, to the haptics of reading that her writerly touch calls for. In so doing, she invites us to think about the tactile imaginings of nineteenth-century American literature, and to reflect on the critical value of hapticality as a mode of writing and a practice of reading for literary studies.

The digital turn has led to multiple developments in cinematic creation. For instance, the use of VFX (Visual Effects) and CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) is spreading beyond such genres as Sci-Fi and Fantasy, affording novel forms of perceptual storytelling. Another notable development is the transnational production and diffusion of series and films on streaming platforms, increasing international access to ‘glocalized’ (global/local) productions in complex cultural flows and counter-flows (e.g., South- Korean series and Telugu cinema). In this fast-moving context, academic research, conducted for instance in media studies, tends to focus on economic, political, and sociocultural issues, while close filmic analyses of the productions remain relatively rare. An analytical focus on haptic gestures in international series available on streaming platforms will be a way of raising the question of methodology in film analysis when it comes to this contemporary type of visual artefacts and their various and multilayered forms of kinesic storytelling and cinematographic expressions.

This paper, which is based on my new book, Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (CUP 2023), is an invitation to look at tact as an intuitive and creative mode of negotiating the appropriate distance between people. I show how tact becomes significant in times of crisis, when established codes of sociability disintegrate, and new modes of communication must be found. I reconstruct tact’s conceptual history from the late eighteenth century to the present, to then focus on three periods of socio-political upheaval that have marked the twentieth century: the First World War, the Second World War and – different, but equally significant in terms of disrupting traditional ways of living together – the student revolution of 1968. In a series of reading encounters (incl. Goethe, Helmholtz, Proust, Plessner, Adorno, Gadamer, Truffaut, and Barthes), I reconsider how we engage with other people, images, and texts, and gauge the significance of tact in our time.

Touch is usually reduced not only to actual physical contact but to the sense of presence, viz. of the present. Drawing on the Husserlian analysis of time and touch, here we explore the ideas of distant touch and tactile memory, to then show how these tactile dynamics of lived experience are expressed in literature. Focusing on Alejandra Costamagna’s novel The System of Touch (2018), we will see how, if touch can be considered the ultimate confirmation of reality and a basic element of sensory perception, it accomplishes these functions only against the background of remembered, imaginary and fictional tactile fragments better understood and captured by literature.

This paper explores the poetics and politics of touch in Claude McKay’s recently recovered modernist novel Romance in Marseille (1929–1933, published in 2020). Through an emphasis on the protagonist Lafala’s “dancing legs,” the narrative posits strong connections between black identity and touch—both the sensuality of dancing and the ability to touch the African soil. Yet these connections are irrevocably severed by the traumatic experience the novel opens with: stowing away on a transatlantic liner, Lafala is discovered and locked up in the glacial latrines, in conditions evocative of the triangular trade, which causes him to lose his legs to frostbite. Adopting an intersectional viewpoint, I analyze the novel’s ambivalent reflection on how disability intersects with and transforms Lafala’s racial identity and class status in unexpected and paradoxically empowering ways, resulting in a “Pyrrhic victory” that becomes the catalyst of new, more heightened touching experiences (in the combined senses of haptics and affect).

Focusing on The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, this article intends to map out the ways in which touch is restored as a reliable yet complex epistemological path in ecofeminist speculative fiction. While touch is a sense that boasts immediacy between the touching subject and the touched object, The Fifth Sacred Thing portrays it as a mode of knowing that requires effort and proceeds gradually, following its own regime and geography and literalizing the spacing at the heart of touch theorized by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. While it produces instantaneous effects, it also induces stases which allow both texts to frequently feature touch as a place, or the touched thing as a pattern, which gives literary presence to the neuroscientific hypothesis of a tactile field. The interpenetration in which touch often results in the two novels also sets touch as an exemplary sense to meet the universe halfway.