| Description |
1 online resource (225 pages) |
| Contents |
Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; List of figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Emmanuel Levinas; 1.1 His life and works; 1.2 The Other: a crucial philosophical issue; 1.3 Levinas and his ethics of the face; Notes; Works consulted; 2. Face value; 2.1 Anatomy of the face; 2.2 Reading the face; 2.3 Face and/as mask; 2.4 Religion of the face; 2.5 Artists of the face; Notes; Works consulted; 3. Facial disfigurement and its repairs; 3.1 The tragedies of facial disfigurement; 3.2 Plastic and reconstructive surgery: a brief historical outline; Note |
|
Works consulted4. Elephant people; 4.1 Monsters, curiosities, freaks: nature's failure or god's admonishment?; 4.2 The many lives of one existence-Joseph Carey Merrick; 4.3 Diagnosing Merrick's disease; 4.4 Abhorring allure: show versus tale; 4.5 The "strangely musical" voice-singing through the mask; Works consulted; 5. Narratives on facial disfigurement; 5.1 In the eye of the beholder: Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"; 5.2 The angel of music behind the mask: The Phantom of the Opera |
|
5.3 "Am I supposed to paint what is on the face, what is in the face, or what is behind the face?" (Picasso): Willa Cather's "The Profile"5.4 "Perfection is an asymptote"9: Richard Selzer's "Imelda"; 5.5 A man minus his nose: Richard Selzer's "The Sympathetic Nose"; 5.6 "Far away from my face": Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face; 5.7 The song of a face: Natalie Kusz's Road Song; 5.8 The pric(z)e for a new face: full-face transplant in narratives as yet unwritten; Notes; Works consulted; Conclusion; Index |
| Summary |
Offering readings of a range of fictional and biographical texts, including work by Richard Selzer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gaston Leroux, Willa Cather, Natalie Kusz, and Lucy Grealy, this book examines reactions to facially disfigured people on the basis of Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of the face. Drawing on Levinas' concern with the holistic dimension of the face as an encounter with the other's "whole person" and the sense of moral obligation that this instils in us--a sense that disfigurement disrupts by drawing our attention to the disfigurement as a "spectacle" and threatening to limit our view of that individual--the author explores how we react to the facially disfigured and how we ought to react |
| Notes |
Gudrun M. Grabher is Full Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She was previously a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and the recipient of a research scholarship to Tokyo, as well as a guest professor at the University of Vienna in Austria and at the University of Notre Dame in the USA. Her main fields of research are American poetry, literature and philosophy, literature and the arts, and medical humanities |
|
Print version record |
| Subject |
Lévinas, Emmanuel.
|
| SUBJECT |
Lévinas, Emmanuel fast |
| Subject |
Disfigured persons.
|
|
Face -- Abnormalities -- Psychological aspects
|
|
American literature.
|
|
Disfigured persons in literature.
|
|
Face perception in literature.
|
|
Face (Philosophy)
|
|
Physical-appearance-based bias.
|
|
Identity (Psychology)
|
|
MEDICAL -- Surgery -- General.
|
|
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
|
|
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Sociology -- General.
|
|
Physical-appearance-based bias
|
|
Identity (Psychology)
|
|
Face (Philosophy)
|
|
Face perception in literature
|
|
Disfigured persons in literature
|
|
American literature
|
|
Disfigured persons
|
|
Face -- Abnormalities -- Psychological aspects
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9781351617604 |
|
1351617605 |
|
9781315110950 |
|
1315110954 |
|
9781351617598 |
|
1351617591 |
|
9781351617581 |
|
1351617583 |
|
