Turning Away - The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture

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.

Info autore

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.

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Benjamin A Saltzman, Benjamin A. Saltzman
• Editore: University Of Chicago Press
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 02.03.2026
• EAN: 9780226847221
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84722-1
• Pagine: 304
• Serie: Thinking Literature
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi; Scienze umane, arte, musica > Scienze linguistiche e letterarie > Letteratura generale e comparata; Europe, Russia, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, History of Art, History of art & design styles: c 1400 to c 1600, History of art: Byzantine & Medieval art c 500 CE to c 1400, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, c 1000 CE to c 1500, Philosophy: aesthetics, 15th century, c 1400 to c 1499, Literary theory, 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, c 1500 to c 1600, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Medieval style, ART / Russian & Soviet, ART / Movements / Medieval, ART / History / 1400-1600 C.E.