On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene - Hardcover

Gonzalez-Crussi, F

3.94

33 ratings by Goodreads

9781585676743: On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585676748 ISBN 13: 9781585676743

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2006

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A historical, cultural, and spiritual examination of the phenomena associated with seeing evaluates how the sense of sight is a foremost component of awareness and survival, considers modern advances in microscopy and photography, and surveys the ways in which perception affects everyday life. By the author of On Being Born and Other Difficulties.

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From the Publisher:

Sight is almost unanimously regarded as the sense mose vital to our day-to-day survival and awareness of the world around us. It is also the sense that dominates our subconscious and our dreams, and from the earliest efforts in the arts, painters and sculptors have explored the boundaries between these two states. In this elegantly written and probing examination of vision, award-winning author F. Gonzalez-Crussi explores the breadth of fascinating phenomena associated with seeing.

From ancient myth (Actaeon's illicit glimpse of the bathing Diana), to eighteenth-century France (when two voyeurs sparked a bloody anti-royalist riot on the Champs-de-Mars), to modern-day advances in microscopy and photography, Gonzalez-Crussi surveys the ways in which, through the sense of sight, perceiver and perceived are inextricably joined, each affecting the other in a profound way, and how our awareness of this union has led to millennia of curious preoccupations.

With its spectacular breadth, insight, wit, and fascinating detail, On Seeing is a vastly entertaining book that enlarges our awareness of the world around us.

From the Inside Flap:

Sight is almost unanimously regarded as the sense most vital to our day-to-day survival and awareness of the world around us. It is also the sense that dominates our subconscious and our dreams, and from the earliest efforts in the arts, painters and sculptors have explored the boundaries between these two states. In this elegantly written and probing examination of vision, award-winning author F. Gonzales-Crussi explores the breadth of fascinating phenomena associated with seeing.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.