Forgetting Lot's Wife : On Destructive Spectatorship.
Title:
Forgetting Lot's Wife : On Destructive Spectatorship.
Author:
Harries, Martin.
ISBN:
9780823227358
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (177 pages)
Contents:
Title Page -- Contents -- Preface: Looking Back on Lot's Wife -- Introduction -- Anonymous -- Picturing Lot's Wife -- Cities and Subjects -- Forget -- Chapter 1: Artaud, Spectatorship, and Catastrophe -- Chapter 2: Hollywood Sodom -- Chapter 3: Anselm Kiefer's Lot's Wife: Perspective and the Place of the Spectator -- Chapter 4: Lot's Wife on September 11, 2001 -- or, Against Figuration -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Abstract:
Can looking at disaster and mass death destroy us? In Forgetting Lot's Wife, Martin Harries provides a theory and a fragmentary history of destructive spectatorship in the twentieth century, and the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. The fragments of this history lead back to the story of Lot's wife: looking back at the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, she turns into a pillar of salt. This story of punishment and transformation becomes the template for the modern fear that looking back at disaster might petrify the spectator. Harries traces the aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical consequences of this idea, in detailed studies of the theatrical theory of Antonin Artaud, American films, and paintings by Anselm Kiefer. He closes with an extended meditation on September 11.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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