The Haptic Arts: How Touch Shapes Our Place in the World

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.