Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

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Description

This book specializes in six brilliant women who are frequently seen as particularly tough minded Simone Weil Hannah Arendt Mary McCarthy Susan Sontag Diane Arbus and Joan Didion Aligned with no single tradition they escape straightforward categories Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical standpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering What Mary McCarthy referred to as a cold eye used to be not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion it used to be an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world should be treated concretely in an instant and realistically without recourse to either melodrama or callousness As Deborah Nelson shows this stance offers crucial counter tradition to the common postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other In the long run in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation this austere school of the unsentimental offers new how one can approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness

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