A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A compelling, radical, “richly explored” (The New York Times Book Review) and “insightful” (Vanity Fair) collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from prizewinning novelist Siri Hustvedt, acclaimed author of The Blazing World and What I Loved.
In this expansive volume, Hustvedt presents a trilogy of intellectually daring works that reveal the striking breadth of her knowledge across the humanities and sciences. Armed with passionate curiosity and multidimensional insight, she repeatedly challenges cultural assumptions and inherited ideas.
“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women”—the title essay—explores not only specific artworks by Picasso, de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, and others, but also the very nature of human perception and the biases embedded in how we view art, literature, and each other.
In “The Delusions of Certainty,” Hustvedt dissects the mind-body problem, revealing how neuroscience, AI, and evolutionary psychology often oversimplify the complexities of human consciousness. “What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition” delves into Kierkegaard, suicide, synesthesia, memory, hysteria, and the role of fiction in understanding identity.
Wide-ranging and deeply erudite, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is a vital meditation on thinking, knowing, and being—a landmark of interdisciplinary thought that cements Siri Hustvedt as one of the most perceptive voices of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this erudite collection, novelist Hustvedt (The Blazing World) explores philosophical questions central to the humanities using research from other disciplines, such as biology, feminist theory, and neuroscience. The questions relate to the self, epistemology, and art and literature, among other things. In the middle portion of the book, in an essay that ought to become canonical, Hustvedt examines the problematic underpinnings of current scientific fads such as evolutionary psychology and computational theory of mind. Her lengthy exercise in phenomenology provides a dense, succinct overview of the mind/body problem, which "has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks." The questions that preoccupy Hustvedt are the questions of a novelist, but they take consciousness itself as their subject: Where do ideas come from? How do stories get created? What is reflective self-consciousness, and how is it formed? What role do imagination, emotion, memory, and the unconscious play in this thing we call mind? The book conveys the wide range of Hustvedt's reading as she focuses on the interstices between people; between disciplines; and between concepts such as art and science, truth and fiction, feeling and perception. The research is sound and the scholarship engaging, and the exacting prose turns humorous and almost warm when Hustvedt incorporates her personal reflections, exhibiting, as she says of the artist Louise Bourgeois, "a quick mind, interested above all in its own contents."
