The politics of touch

Abstract

Through this thesis, I aim to deconstruct and reconstruct what it means to reach out and touch another by analyzing the role of physical touch in literature with a New Historicist approach. In other words, I am reading into the signification of touch within different literary texts while taking into account the text's geographical, historical, and sociological conditions. In a different time, place, and sociocultural climate, the same signifier--such as touch--will necessarily have different significations. Therefore, touch in all of its forms must be read within its individual literary context.