A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind - Hardcover

Hustvedt, Siri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501141090 ISBN 13: 9781501141096

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Synopsis

A compelling and radical collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from prize-winning novelist Siri Hustvedt, the acclaimed author of The Blazing World and What I Loved.

Siri Hustvedt has always been fascinated by biology and how human perception works. She is a lover of art, the humanities, and the sciences. She is a novelist and a feminist. Her lively, lucid essays in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women begin to make some sense of those plural perspectives.

Divided into three parts, the first section, "A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women," investigates the perceptual and gender biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. Among the legendary figures considered are Picasso, De Kooning, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Guerrilla Girls, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

The second part, "The Delusions of Certainty," is about the age-old mind/body problem that has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks. Hustvedt explains the relationship between the mental and the physical realms, showing what lies beyond the argument--desire, belief, and the imagination.

The final section, "What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition," discusses neurological disorders and the mysteries of hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology, and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound and powerful consideration of suicide.

There has been much talk about building a beautiful bridge across the chasm that separates the sciences and the humanities. At the moment, we have only a wobbly walkway, but Hustvedt is encouraged by the travelers making their way across it in both directions. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is an insightful account of the journeys back and forth.

About this title

Review:

PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT'S NONFICTION

"A brilliant explorer of brain and mind."
--Oliver Sacks

"No one writing about art today comes closer than Siri Hustvedt to the elusive strangeness of a great painting."
--Calvin Tomkins

"[Siri Hustvedt] brings both knowledge and an artist's insight to the discussion of memory, language, and personal identity... It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear."
--Hilary Mantel

"[Hustvedt's] responses to paintings are both visceral and intellectual...At their best, her essays combine the insights of her intuitive eye with an extensive knowledge of Western painting."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Armed with her great gift for elucidation, the novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt has omnivorously devoured and digested complex debates from neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy and psychoanalysis and journeyed into the mind/body problem."
--George Makari

*BEST BOOKS OF 2016 SELECTION BY * KIRKUS REVIEWS * THE FINANCIAL TIMES *
*BEST BOOKS OF DECEMBER 2016 SELECTION BY * BUSTLE * VULTURE * FLAVORWIRE *

"Richly explored...and, when art is the subject, touchingly personal...It's hard to overstate the pleasure and the comfort that such demystification provides...it does indeed make the world feel larger, more expansive, more alive to the touch."
--New York Times Book Review

"Insightful."
--Vanity Fair

"A wide-ranging, irreverent, and absorbing meditation on thinking, knowing, and being."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Erudite and intellectually sophisticated...Hustvedt is beguiling and wholly present in each lively, first-person, thrillingly interdisciplinary narrative."
--Booklist (starred review)

"Canonical . . . A dense, succinct overview of the mind/body problem . . . Conveys the wide range of Hustvedt's reading as she focuses on the interstices between people; between disciplines; and between concepts such as art and science, truth and fiction, feeling and perception."
--Publishers Weekly

"Hustvedt has provided us with an impressive collection that celebrates critical thinking."
--The Guardian

"We are fortunate to have Hustvedt voicing doubt so intelligently."
--Financial Times

"Searing."
--Elle

"Erudite."
--Vulture

"Ingeniously and energetically put together. . . . The Blazing World never runs out of steam in dispensing ideas and peeling back layers of truth."--Chicago Tribune

"The Blazing World is Siri Hustvedt's best novel yet, an electrifying work with a titanic, poignantly flawed protagonist. Harriet Burden's rage, turbulence and neediness leap off these pages in a skillfully orchestrated chorus of voices both dark and brilliant."--The Washington Post

"In certain respects, The Blazing World is a didactic novel, presenting arguments about the place of gender in American cultural life, yet it avoids preaching or settled judgments by putting at its center a figure whose strongly held beliefs are undermined by the hazards of real life. The effect is more fluid and nuanced than any scholarly study or political diatribe could be."--The Wall Street Journal

"Complex, astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing."--NPR

"This is feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, or Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced. And at the same time, the book is a spectacularly good read. Its storytelling is magnificent, its characters vivid, its plot gripping; it's rare that a novel of ideas can be so much fun."--Slate

"Dazzling. . . ingeniously constructed. . . . The Blazing World is a serious, sometimes profound book, tackling head-on the knotty issues of identity and sense of self, and our unconscious ideas about gender and celebrity. It offers an exhilarating reading experience for anyone willing to meet its challenge."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Siri Hustvedt has a rare gift for finding the human heart in what might be cerebral musings and rarefied settings."--Columbus Dispatch

"The absence of women artists in the history of painting is an old feminist topic, but it is one The Blazing World approaches head-on."--The Guardian

Book Description:

A trail-blazing and inspiring collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology by the internationally bestselling novelist Siri Hustvedt

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501141090
• ISBN 13: 9781501141096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 552