Binding: Paperback
Description: This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough - minded: Simone Weil Hannah Arendt Mary Mc Carthy Susan Sontag Diane Arbus and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary Mc Carthy called a "cold eye" was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre - eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely directly and realistically without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows this stance offers an important counter - tradition to the common postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation this austere "school of the unsentimental" offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.
Title: Tough Enough Arbus Arendt Didion Mccarthy Sontag Weil
Author(s): Nelson Deborah
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226457802
Pages: 224 Pages
Publication Date: 4/3/2017
Category: Literature: History & Criticism