"This is the sort of book that might tickle the curiosity of an inquisitive undergraduate reader lured in the direction of its sources and examples, even as it reveals hidden surfaces and titillating details in those materials for a more experienced scholar. . . . A charming addition to any contemporary aesthetics collection. . . . Highly recommended."

CHOICE

"More than an academic work. . . . Unsurprisingly, this book is enjoyable both as an intellectual journey through the text of various works, and as a tactile account of the experience and close relation to the text of a practitioner of literature. The pleasure is enhanced by Maurette’s impeccable style and his capacity to tell stories, of books, works of art, or words."

Interfaces

"Immensely learned, open to a great variety of traditions and disciplines, The Forgotten Sense belongs to a new crop of readable, friendly books, reminiscent of open conversations among cultivated people. Energetic, diverse, the book agreeably jumps from one period to the next and from one issue to another, in the end succeeding to make a strong point about an invisible, yet deeply ‘touching’ aspect of art and literature."

Thomas Pavel | Between

“The Forgotten Sense is one of the most intelligent, well crafted, and original collection of literary essays that I have had the pleasure to read. Maurette meditates on the many facets of the sense of touch, reflecting on some of its properties, such as pain, pleasure, pressure, temperature, speed, and balance. He then explores how touch has been represented throughout time in portraiture and sculpture, philosophy, and literature, and how it has frequently turned these forms of art into a sensorial feast.”

Enrique García Santo-Tomás, University of Michigan

"To insist on the existential urgency of staying in touch, quite literally, with the material world that we are inhabiting, has become one of the philosophical priorities of our present. Pablo Maurette, however, has opened a new dimension for this discussion by developing concrete answers to the question how the media of aesthetic experience, how texts, films, and artworks can become instrumental in initiating such closeness to the material world to which, ontologically, they do not belong. His readings, from this perspective, of Western classics like Chrétien de Troyes and Diderot, Kafka and von Hofmannsthal, inscribe themselves in an emerging new style of critical analysis."

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

“This beautiful book discovers the haptic sense, pressing close and taking the shape of its object, woven into Western literature from its earliest days. Maurette deftly unfolds and refolds history so that his thrilling discoveries—from Epicurean atomism to a sixteenth century dialogue on kissing to Marinetti's ill-fated tactile manifesto—arrive to us as though nestled side by side.”

Laura U. Marks, author of Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media