The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the WorldOxford University Press, 1985 - 385 pages Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. |
From inside the book
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... materials in their research department , for granting me permission to quote from those materials , and for their day - by - day assistance during the weeks when I worked in their midst ; their generosity was as unfailing as it was ...
... material form , and the book has enacted its own content by itself gradually acquiring a material form . Many people at Oxford participated in the physical construction of this book ; I am especially fortunate to have had William Sisler ...
... Material Making : Body and Voice in the Judeo - Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx 181 Chapter 5 The Interior Structure of the Artifact 278 Notes 327 Index 373 The Body in Pain INTRODUCTION LTHOUGH this book has only.
... material and verbal expressibility or , more simply , the nature of human creation . It might be best to picture these three subjects as three concentric circles , for when we enter into the innermost space of the first , we quickly ...
... material culture , or material self - expression . As has become evident even in this brief review of the four initial assertions of this book ( and as will become much more evident ) , the difficulty of articulating physical pain ...
Contents
The Structure of Torture The Conversion of Real Pain into Fiction of Power | 27 |
The Structure of War The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues | 60 |
Pain and Imagining | 161 |
The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making Body and Voice in the JudeoChristian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx | 181 |
The Interior Structure of the Artifact | 278 |
Notes | 327 |
Index | 371 |