New Book Salon, “Turning Away”

A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. 

“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? 

“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

Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame or 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.

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.

Benjamin Saltzman (University of Chicago) will be in conversation with Bronwen Wilson (UCLA, Art History) and David Russell (UCLA, English).

Benjamin 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.

Bronwen Wilson is the Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art and the Director of the Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Wilson is the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming book, The Face of Uncertainty. She is also coeditor of Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body and The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art.

David Russell is associate professor of English at UCLA and the author of Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Marion Milner: On Creativity.

Cosponsored by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Department of English, and the Department of Art History.