#1302 Benjamin Saltzman - Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture

Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Benjamin Saltzman. He's professor of English language and literature at the University of Chicago. And today we're going to talk about his book Turning Away the Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. So Doctor Saltzman, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay, so turning away I mean uh first of all, what is it to a turn away?

Well Ricardo, it's a lot of different things and one of the one of the the the ways that this book opens up into itself is by exploring the different ways in which we turn away and the different ways that artists have represented Um, variations on this gesture, covering one's eyes, averting one's gaze, turning one's back. um looking away in a lot of different

uh across a lot of different varieties. And And that's that's how the book was written, and it's how I think the experience of reading it um comes through, where you encounter one variety of this gesture after another, and with each new instance you begin to realize First of all, how frequently it appears in our world and and in our aesthetic encounters.

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