Tough Enough

Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

Deborah Nelson

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English

Chicago University Press
03 April 2017

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Literature: history & criticism

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often 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 viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was 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 must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.

By: Deborah Nelson
Imprint: Chicago University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 23mm, Width: 15mm, Spine: 1mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9780226457802
ISBN 10: 022645780X
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 03 April 2017
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Deborah Nelson is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America.

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

<i>Tough Enough</i> is a brilliant defense of coldness. Nelson gathers together six extraordinarily well-known modern women who, one way or another, and often in deep and sometimes conspicuous concert, championed theological, philosophical, and political principles, as well as aesthetic practices, which together constitute an important school of the unsentimental. For those who are devoted to these six figures, who can t get enough of them, and who always knew that they somehow belonged together, this illuminating book will be welcomed as a revelation and confirmation. --Jeff Nunokawa, author of Note Book