Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture: Thinking Literature
Autor Benjamin A. Saltzmanen Limba Engleză Paperback – 6 apr 2026
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 scenes 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 scenes 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.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226847221
ISBN-10: 0226847225
Pagini: 304
Ilustrații: 17 color plates, 73 halftones
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Seria Thinking Literature
ISBN-10: 0226847225
Pagini: 304
Ilustrații: 17 color plates, 73 halftones
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Seria Thinking Literature
Notă biografică
Benjamin A. Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.
Cuprins
Prologue
Chapter 1: Parodos
Chapter 2: Ambivalence
Chapter 3: Sensation
Chapter 4: Darkness
Chapter 5: Retroversion
Exodos
Gratitude
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
Chapter 1: Parodos
Chapter 2: Ambivalence
Chapter 3: Sensation
Chapter 4: Darkness
Chapter 5: Retroversion
Exodos
Gratitude
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
Recenzii
“Endlessly rich, and as imaginative as it is scholarly, Turning Away gives us startlingly new insights into a fascinatingly negative gesture.”
“Turning away from that which is difficult to watch: it is a moral choice, a spontaneous gesture, a long-standing object of representation. 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.”
“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. 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.”
“In far-flung and compelling examples from art, literature, film, and photography, Saltzman explores a gesture that seems ubiquitous, yet hovers at the edge of meaning. This lavish and virtuosic book finds in the gesture of turning away an entire history of why we turn to art to understand what we cannot look at directly.”
“Turning away from that which is difficult to watch: it is a moral choice, a spontaneous gesture, a long-standing object of representation. 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.”
“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. 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.”
“In far-flung and compelling examples from art, literature, film, and photography, Saltzman explores a gesture that seems ubiquitous, yet hovers at the edge of meaning. This lavish and virtuosic book finds in the gesture of turning away an entire history of why we turn to art to understand what we cannot look at directly.”