Wooden Eyes - Hardcover

Ginzburg, Carlo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231119607 ISBN 13: 9780231119603

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2001

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 Ginzburg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question: "What is 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 Ginzburg explores with an impressive array of examples, from Latin translations of Greek and Hebrew scriptures to Pope John Paul II's recent apology to the Jews for antisemitism. Moving with equal acuity from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius to Montaigne to Voltaire, touching on philosophy, history, philology, and ethics, and including examples from present-day popular culture, the book offers a new perspective on the universally relevant theme of distance.

About this title

About the Author

Carlo Ginzburg teaches at UCLA, where he is the Franklin D. Murphy Chair of Italian Renaissance Studies. His other books in English include The Cheese and the Worms, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

Reviews

Best known for The Cheese and the Worms, a micro-history about a 16th-century miller with a heretical cosmology, Ginzburg has also produced masterpieces on early modern Europe and the Inquisition. Now he offers a collection (published in Italy in 1998) of nine essays that simultaneously explore history and historical pursuit, contingent as the latter is on temporal (and thereby emotional) perspective. Ginzburg, who teaches at UCLA and the University of Bologna, writes, "[F]amiliarity, which is in the last analysis bound up with cultural belonging, cannot be a criterion of what is relevant." Such expansiveness infuses his reflections on everything from the artistic device of defamiliarization ("for revitalizing our perceptions"), to different religious practices ("both the Greek reflection on myth and the Jewish prohibition of idolatry are instruments of distantiation"), to "the ambiguity of the relationship between Jews and Christians, in which closeness and distance have interlaced... for two millennia." Ginzburg masterfully incorporates ideas and passages from Tacitus and the Bible, as well as Proust, the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, Hume and Paul Val‚ry. Twenty-six illustrations, ranging from a carving on a Roman sarcophagus to Magritte's painting of a pipe, are used to explicate complicated ideas and passages. The reader should be forewarned: Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound. From Plato to Alan Sokal, he traverses time and space, sometimes leaving readers bewildered, awed or breathless. General readers will find Ginzburg's essays well worth their rigorous attention; historians will marvel at his skill.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231119607
• ISBN 13: 9780231119603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320