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Reviews

“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. 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. 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?"" * “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.” * D. Vance Smith, author of ""Atlas’s Bones"" *

Author Information

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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