“Today both reality and entertainment crowd our
fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture,
horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such
imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a
just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting
author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with
an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty
makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality
TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the
apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a
model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally
strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and
permissibility…”
