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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > So what Non-Fiction have you read?
 
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DirtyRobot
Dec 15, 2003

it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty
Right now I'm reading Myra Jehlen's Five Fictions in Search of Truth. There's a bit in the introduction about Flaubert including an aqueduct in a realist depiction of ancient Carthage (which had none), and it seems to address every "tactical realism" argument or discussion ever that they have in Cinema Discusso:

quote:

“His invention implemented the real; it was as real as the real, as true as the truth, maybe more so. He was not making an extravagant claim" (6).

“In a letter Flaubert actually regretted its invention: he had been cowardly, he should have persisted and found something to the purpose in the historical record. But cowardly or not, he still maintained, through its remarkable formal expediency—its truth to the story—the aqueduct was true, it was real. It had emerged out of the work of form, and form, plot in this case but as well style working at the level of words and sentences, was a guarantee of truth. By the force of its own logic and necessities, form could bring out the logic and necessities of the object it described” (6).
On a totally different front, I actually really like Richard Dawkins' really early biology/evolution stuff--The Extended Phenotype in particular (though I'm a total layman). I hate his recent stuff.

Request! I'm looking for something accessible yet somewhat academic or written by an academic about the ways in which we distance ourselves from suffering (a treatment of the old expression, "out of sight, out of mind," basically). Like, there is suffering in the world we know about, and consciously we feel "bad" about it, but nonetheless we are able to get on with our day. Discussions of this kind of thing also now often come up a lot with animal suffering, as in the common story of the person who visits a slaughter house or factory farm and immediately gives up eating all animals, with no problems. Zizek talks about a similar kind of thing when he talks about poo poo and toilets, but, uh, I want something other than that.

* # ¿ Mar 3, 2014 00:26
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 09:30
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DirtyRobot
Dec 15, 2003

it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

rasser posted:

Susan Sontag's Regarding the pain of others, which I mentioned above but didn't describe much, is a good read on the subject. Books on coping/defense mechanisms may be of help too, but I have no idea which.

Thanks! I'll check it out based on this.

* # ¿ Mar 4, 2014 15:23
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > So what Non-Fiction have you read?