Read Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature)

Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature)

Benjamin A. Saltzman

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Description:A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others. Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential episodes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these episodes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.“Endlessly rich, and as imaginative as it is scholarly, Turning Away gives us startlingly new insights into a fascinatingly negative gesture.” - Sianne Ngai, author of Ugly Feelings“Turning away from that which is difficult to watch: it is a moral choice, a spontaneous gesture, a long-standing object of representation. Benjamin Saltzman explores this entwinement of ethics, aesthetics, and impulse across centuries, in art as well as literature. Composed with an electric blend of writerly elegance and moral urgency, this erudite book compels its readers to keep our eyes fixed on its pages."- Marta Figlerowicz, author of Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature"Turning Away marks a decisive turn in the whole discipline of visual studies, away from the usual focus on seeing as a positive movement toward objects and spectacles, toward the aversive reflex and its contrary, the deliberate refusal to look. Benjamin Saltzman complicates our understanding of the visual field as a place of moral attention, and leads us into the dark passages of emotional and ethical ambivalence. This is a book that makes a difference, not only in our grasp of human visuality, but in all the mixed feelings of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, thought and feeling that make us the crazy animals we are."- W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want?We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature). To get started finding Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature), you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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ISBN: 0226847225

Description: A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others. Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential episodes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these episodes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.“Endlessly rich, and as imaginative as it is scholarly, Turning Away gives us startlingly new insights into a fascinatingly negative gesture.” - Sianne Ngai, author of Ugly Feelings“Turning away from that which is difficult to watch: it is a moral choice, a spontaneous gesture, a long-standing object of representation. Benjamin Saltzman explores this entwinement of ethics, aesthetics, and impulse across centuries, in art as well as literature. Composed with an electric blend of writerly elegance and moral urgency, this erudite book compels its readers to keep our eyes fixed on its pages."- Marta Figlerowicz, author of Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature"Turning Away marks a decisive turn in the whole discipline of visual studies, away from the usual focus on seeing as a positive movement toward objects and spectacles, toward the aversive reflex and its contrary, the deliberate refusal to look. Benjamin Saltzman complicates our understanding of the visual field as a place of moral attention, and leads us into the dark passages of emotional and ethical ambivalence. This is a book that makes a difference, not only in our grasp of human visuality, but in all the mixed feelings of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, thought and feeling that make us the crazy animals we are."- W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want?We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature). To get started finding Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature), you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature)

Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Thinking Literature)

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