Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

Book Event

Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room

April 19, 2018  6:15 pm

In Tough Enough, Deborah Nelson discusses Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion -- six exceptional women with a shared understanding of suffering and sentimentality. From the University of Chicago Press description:

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 familiar 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.

This event is free and open to the public; no registration needed.

http://heymancenter.org/events/deborah-nelson-on-tough-enough-1/

April 19, 2018
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