The Tell-Tale Hand: Gothic Narratives and the Brain
Journal Title: Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture - Year 2016, Vol 6, Issue 6
Abstract
The opening story in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson is called simply “Hands.” It is about a teacher’s remarkable hands that sometimes seem to move independently of his will. This essay explores some of the relevant contexts and potential links, beginning with other representations of teachers’ hands, such as Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and the Angel, early efforts to establish a sign-language for the deaf, and including the Montessori method of teaching children to read and write by tracing the shape of letters with their hands on rough emery paper. The essay then explores filmic hands that betray or work independently of conscious intentions, from Dr Strangelove, Mad Love, to The Beast With Five Fingers. Discussion of the medical literature about the “double” of our hands in the brain, including “phantom hands,” leads on to a series of images that register Rodin’s lifelong fascination with sculpting separate hands.
Authors and Affiliations
Neil Forsyth
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP326105
- DOI 10.1515/texmat-2016-0006
- Views 73
- Downloads 0
Sensing the Present: “Conceptual Art of the Senses”
After Rachel E. Burke briefly introduces the essays presented with a focus on our contemporary relationship to modern subjectivity, Mieke Bal will make the case for the sense of presentness on an affective and sensuous l...
“Consider Yourself One of Us”: The Dickens Musical on Stage and Screen
Charles Dickens’s work has been taken and adapted for many different ends. Quite a lot of attention has been given to film and television versions of the novels, many of which are very distinguished. The stage and screen...
Masculinities, History and Cultural Space: Queer Emancipative Thought in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys
At Swim, Two Boys, a 2001 novel by Jamie O’Neill, tells a story of gay teen romance in the wake of the Easter Rising. This paper considers the ways in which the characters engage in patterns of masculine behaviour in a c...
Recessive Action in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn accompanies Eilis Lacey, a native of Enniscorthy, Ireland of the 1950s on a reluctant voyage across the Atlantic. Her passage reconstructs a common experience of immigration and exile to...
Caryl Churchill’s Artificial and Orificial Bodies: Between Subjective and Non-Subjective Nobody’s Emotion or Affect
This article analyzes the shift from emotion to affect in Caryl Churchill’s writing for the theatre, a process which becomes prominent in the later seventies and culminates in the production of A Mouthful of Birds, a pro...