Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World

Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World

Benthien, Claudia
Dunlap, Thomas

Paperback

Series: European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

AnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0231125038
ISBN13: 9780231125031
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Oct 6 2004
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Only skin deep, getting under one's skin, the naked truth metaphors about the skin pervade the language even as physical embellishments and alterations--tattoos, piercings, skin-lifts, liposuction, tanning, and more--proliferate in Western culture. Yet outside dermatology textbooks, the topic of skin has been largely ignored.

This important cultural study shows how our perception of skin has changed from the eighteenth century to the present. Claudia Benthien argues that despite medicine's having penetrated the bodily surface and exposed the interior of the body as never before, skin, paradoxically, has become a more and more unyielding symbol. She examines the changing significance of skin through brilliant analyses of literature, art, philosophy, and anatomical drawings and writings. Benthien discusses the semantic and psychic aspects of touching, feeling, and intellectual perception; the motifs of perforated, armored, or transparent skin; the phantasma of flaying; and much more through close readings of such authors as Kleist, Hawthorne, Balzac, Rilke, Kafka, Plath, Morrison, Wideman, and Ondaatje. Myriad images from the Renaissance, anatomy books, and contemporary visual and performance art enhance the text.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Anthropology

View All