Description
Book SynopsisThis book presents a fresh understanding of the ethical legacy of the biblical figure of Lot’s wife. It draws on archives of Jewish and Christian thought as well as modern philosophical and literary treatments of the Sodom story to show how Lot’s wife’s fate harbors an ethics of reparative resilience.
Trade Review"Lowell Gallagher's Sodomscapes is a stunningly learned and creative engagement with the ethics of looking back--looking back at a past littered with the calcified remains of those rendered mute by traditional Western Christian and philosophical morality and looking back at the other in a pose of vulnerable and creative welcome to a radically unknowable future. Attending to the figure of Lot's wife in a wide range of images, texts, and imagetexts from across the Jewish and Christian traditions and into secular modernity, Gallagher shows that Sodom was always about the double edge of hospitality. In the process Gallagher uncovers and creates a 'counter-memory of Lot's wife' in which homelessness and home, stranger and beloved, danger and hope stand in radical proximity." -- -Amy Hollywood Harvard Divinity School
Table of ContentsPreface: Entering Sodomscape Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape 1. Exodus, Interrupted: Lot's Wife and the Allegorical Interval 2. Figural Neuter, Desert of Allegory 3. Remembering Lot's Wife: The Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life of Mary Ward 4. Avant-Garde Lot's Wife: Natal'ia Goncharova's Salt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality 5. Soundings in Sodomscape: Biblical Purity Codes, Spa Clinics, and the Ends of Immunity 6. The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot's Wife 7. Out of Africa: Albert Memmi's Desert of Allegory in Pillar of Salt Acknowledgments Notes Index
