Sodomscapes

Hospitality in the Flesh

Lowell Gallagher

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823275212, 9780823275205
• eBook ISBN: 9780823275229
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

Sodomscapes presents a fresh approach to the story of Lot's wife, as it's been read across cultures and generations. In the process, it reinterprets foundational concepts of ethics, representation, and the body. While the sudden mutation of Lot's wife in the flight from Sodom is often read to confirm our antiscopic bias, a rival tradition emphasizes the counterintuitive optics required to nurture sustainable habitations for life in view of its unforeseeable contingency.Whether in medieval exegesis, Russian avant-garde art, Renaissance painting, or today's Dead Sea health care tourism industry, the repeated desire to reclaim Lot's wife turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of hospitality. Sodomscape—the book's name for this gesture—revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking and places them in conversation with key thinkers of hospitality. The book's cumulative perspective identifies Lot's wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling, whose in-betweenness discloses counterintuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life amid divergent claims of being-with and being-for.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Entering Sodomscape
• Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape
• 1. Exodus, Interrupted: Lot’s Wife and the Allegorical Interval
• 2. The Rise of Prophecy: 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: Natalia 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 The Pillar of Salt
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index