Touching Spaces in Textures - by Mariam Popal (Paperback)

About the Book

Popal investigates touch in the context of the affectivity unleashed by humor, where often touching spaces ensue in deconstructive ways that affect the senses as well as sense-making.

Book Synopsis

Touch has manifold layers of meaning, especially so in the context of the affectivity unleashed by humor, where often touching spaces ensue in deconstructive ways that affect the senses as well as sense-making. Along these lines, Mariam Popal discusses the works of bell hooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others. She combines them with close readings of literary texts to open up venues for the performativity of rhetorically and poetologically generated critical, transformative thought that also pays attention to the ethics of dialogism, as well as the relation between philosophy and literature.

About the Author

Mariam Popal is associate professor (PD) in comparative literature/world literature at Universität Bayreuth. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Universität Hamburg and a habilitation (second thesis) in general & comparative literature from Universität Bayreuth. She is a member of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple/Arts & Aesthetics, and an associate scholar in American studies at Universität Potsdam. She has taught and conducted research at Universität Freiburg, Universität Basel, the University of Toronto, the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the University of Alberta.