Touching Spaces in Textures: Affective Humor and Dialogism in Contemporary Literature

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.