What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

Author:Peter Mendelsund [Mendelsund, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7164-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

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We colonize books with our familiars; and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with.

We transpose works of nonfiction to similar effect.

When I read a book on the battle of Stalingrad, in my imagination the bombardment, occupation, encirclement, and liberation all took place in Manhattan. Or they took place in an alternate Manhattan; a through-the-looking-glass Manhattan; a counterfactual-history Manhattan; a Manhattangrad, consisting of Soviet-mandated architectural adjustments.

The difference here is that, unlike with fictional settings based on real locales, I feel a strange moral obligation to seek out more information about the real Stalingrad. My customized Stalingrad is a false idea. And however my personalizing of the scene helps me identify with the victims of this outsized drama—the actual victims of the actual tragic events—the act of visual substitution seems somehow disrespectful, wrong.*

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