The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism by Aaron Ritzenberg (review)

Abstract

THE SENTIMENTAL TOUCH: The Language of Feeling in Age of Managerialism. By Aaron Ritzenberg. New York: Fordham University Press. 2013.From Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) through Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Aaron Ritzenberg's The Touch examines how action and meaning of touch in literature changed from midnineteenth to mid-twentieth century. During this period, the utopianism of sentimental touch [was] transformed from a vision of overcoming social barriers to a promise of intimacy in an anonymous (3). With growth of managerial culture, presumption that touch could connect oneself with others to inspire social change was undermined by proliferation of disperse corporate hierarchies, and by rise of literary realism. But importantly, Ritzenberg notes that with their rise, did not vanish. Rather, it was used, reused, and disfigured during rise of managerialism (3). While critiqued-and perhaps manipulated-by authors such Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, sentimental touch persisted: even in literature of realism, as its appearance becomes rarer, its correspondence with a specific utopian ideal becomes more pronounced (6). In this way, sentimental touch continues to capture an idealism that seems loftier, yet more subject to manipulation, today.Ritzenberg's introduction sets up primary tension between and managerialism. If sentimental body was transparent, legible, and intimate, managerial body is opaque, mysterious, and unlocatable (7). This does not mean, however, that these bodies are entirely separate from each other. As Ritzenberg notes in his first chapter, on Uncle Tom's Cabin, sentiment is an emotion managed by its authors: in Stowe's case, sentiment is carefully deployed to train to understand book's political message. Sentimental works show us feelings of characters to manipulate our own feelings. . . . Sentimentalism, then, always has a certain political charge insofar it is engaged in manipulating real bodies, actual lives, of its readers (16-17). By showing potential for radical politics through characters that are touched by slavery's very resistance to touch, Stowe shows how to properly understand world in which they live. It may feel spontaneous, but Ritzenberg demonstrates, sentiment, like most feelings, are not exclusively self-determined.In his second and third chapters, Ritzenberg explores how is critiqued by Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson. The promise of touch to connect people is particularly questioned by Twain in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), through Huck's-and Twain's-constant stretching of stories to suit their purposes. For sentimentalist, truth lies in realm of body. . . . By questioning very possibility of truth, Twain questions political potential of sentimentalism (46). …