Overview

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

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9781665274890

Table of Contents

Reviews

An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics . . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show.-- New York Times

"An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics . . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show.-- ""New York Times"""

Author Information

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder, and The Red Parts. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Tavia Gilbert, a six-time Audie Award nominee and multiple Earphones and Parents' Choice Award-winning producer, narrator, and writer, has appeared on stage and in film. Library Journal said of the highly acclaimed actress, ""as close as you can get to a full cast narration with a solo voice."" Tavia has narrated more than 250 multicast and single-voice audiobooks.

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