Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh
Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh
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Abstract
Sodomscape presents a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife in the reception history of the Sodom story. Premodern biblical cultures found in the scene of abortive flight a monitory sign of improvident curiosity and rooted inhospitality. This book’s cross-cutting array of texts and images—a fifteenth-century illuminated miniature, a group of Counter-Reformation devotional paintings, a Victorian lost-world adventure fantasy, a Russian avant-garde rendering of the flight from Sodom, Albert Memmi’s career-making first novel (The Pillar of Salt), and a contemporary excursion into the Dead Sea healthcare tourism industry—shows how the repeated desire to reclaim Lot’s wife, across millennia and diverse media, turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of the two faces of hospitality – welcome and risk – in diverse cultural locations. Sodomscape—the book’s name for this gesture—revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking (Augustine, Erich Auerbach, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Blumenberg) and places these in conversation with key artisans of the hospitality question, particularly as it bears on the phenomenological condition of attunement to the unfinished character of being in relation to others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt). The book’s cumulative perspective identifies Lot’s wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling between the substantialist dream of resemblance and the mutating dynamism of otherness. The radical in-betweenness of the figure discloses counter-intuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life in the context of divergent claims of being-with and being-for.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape
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1
Exodus, Interrupted: Lot’s Wife and the Allegorical Interval
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2
The Rise of Prophecy: Figural Neuter, Desert of Allegory
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3
Remembering Lot’s Wife: The Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life of Mary Ward
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4
Avant-Garde Lot’s Wife: Natalia Goncharova’s Salt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality
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5
Soundings in Sodomscape: Biblical Purity Codes, Spa Clinics, and the Ends of Immunity
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6
The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife
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7
Out of Africa: Albert Memmi’s Desert of Allegory in The Pillar of Salt
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End Matter
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