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Turning Away
The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture
Series: Thinking Literature
Brief 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...
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Turning Away
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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.
Series: Thinking Literature
View all-
Turning Away
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...Paperback$9700Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Criticism and Truth
A defence and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading. Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In this book, Jonathan Kramnick explains literary criticism’s distinctive approach to knowledge and its disciplinary rationale by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Close reading is the field’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing...Paperback$3799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Reading Hegel
Retrieves Hegelian speculative experience for literary theory. The relationship between Hegel and literary theory has for a long time been both contested and paradoxical. On the one hand, "theory" is often sceptical of all that Hegel ostensibly stood for: idealism, systematicity, and identity at the expense of difference. Yet, in spite of itself, literary theory is taken to owe a...Paperback$5699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Chinese Whispers
Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning. In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. Chinese...Hardback$18899Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Joy of the Worm
Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy. In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as...Paperback$10400Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Chinese Whispers
Chinese Whispers examines multiple contact zones between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds, investigating how poetry both enables and complicates the transpacific production of meaning. In this new book, the noted critic and best-selling author Yunte Huang explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. Chinese...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
The Barthes Fantastic
This study of the writing of Roland Barthes breaks down the divide between lived experience and the language of a literary work. In The Barthes Fantastic, John Lurz explores the intersection of literature and everyday life—and confronts some habits of literary study—through a reading of the work of Roland Barthes. An influential French theorist, Barthes wrote prolifically on the place...Paperback$5299Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Throw Yourself Away
Proposes that we can best understand literature's relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780226847221
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 31 March 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Illustration: 17 color plates, 73 halftones
Audience: Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 25.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 513g
Pages: 304
About the Author
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.
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