Turning Away: Privacy and the Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, talk by Benjamin Saltzman

A yellow book cover with the title 'Turning away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture'. The cover also has an illustration of a person looking away and holding their hand in front of their face. The illustration is a black and white pencil drawing.
Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), by Benjamin Saltzman.

In this talk, Benjamin Saltzman will consider the articulation of privacy in the gesture of turning away, based on his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (University of Chicago Press, 2026).

The talk is open to all, but registration is required. Please register here to attend.

Description of the book: 

A Sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. 

“Endlessly rich, and as imaginative as it is scholarly, Turning Away gives us startlingly new insights into a fascinatingly negative gesture.”—Sianne Ngai, author of Ugly Feelings

Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame or lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world.

Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.

A black and white portrait photograph of a man with dark hair and glasses. He is wearing a light colored shirt and looking into the camera with a subtle smile.
Associate Professor of English, Benjamin Saltzman.

Benjamin A. Saltzman is Associate Professor of English and Deputy Dean in the Division of the Arts & Humanities at the University of Chicago. He edits the journal Modern Philology and is the author of Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture and Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England.