The writing body and the reading sensorium: Material calibrations of a living encounter

Abstract

This paper turns on a concern for that convention that sees the writer dissuaded from imbuing the material dimensions of a piece of writing with meaning – or rather, from disturbing the standardised meaning allotted to these dimensions by the contingencies of a history of print. I’m referring here to literary texts manufactured within a tradition (‘ours’) the particularities of which bar writing from having instilled in its sensually apprehensible form the affective capacity that is instead expected to inhere within writing’s intelligible content. This paper draws attention to the vitality of the surfaces upon which we write and their potential pliability at t..