Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance - Hardcover

Ginzburg, Carlo

4.21

109 ratings by Goodreads

9781859846377: Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859846378 ISBN 13: 9781859846377

Publisher: Verso Books, 2002

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Wooden Eyes Ginzburg's new book is a thought-provoking study of the various meanings of distance. Opening with a defamiliarization, which traces the roots of the idea in classical and enlightenment culture, he moves on to explorations of the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery and myth. Full description

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Review:

"The essays show familiar qualities of Ginzburg's writing, his preference for unconventional perspective, the vigour and sharpness of his reasoning, and his mercurial yet highly disciplined intellectual zest." -- Times Literary Supplement "Ginzberg masterfully incorporates ideas and passages from Tacitus and the Bible, as well as Proust, the Russian critic Viktor Schlovsky, Hume and Paul Valery... [His] scholarship is dazzling and profound" - Publisher's Weekly

Synopsis:

"I am a Jew who was born and who grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of persecution." This brief autobiographical statement is a key to understanding Carlo Ginzberg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question "what id the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are?" To understand our world, suggests Ginzburg, it is necessary to find a balance between being so close to the object that our vision is warped by familiarity or so far from it that the distance becomes distorting. Opening with a reflection on the sense of feeling astray, of familiarization and defamiliarization, the author goes on to consider the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery, and myth. Arising from the theme of proximity is the recurring issue of the opposition between Jews and Christians - a topic Ginzberg explores with an array of examples, from Latin translations to Greek and Hebrew scriptures to Pope John Paul II's recent apology to the Jews for anti-Semitism.

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