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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... possible the initial research into the aesthetic , medical , and political literatures , and funded travel both to the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London and to McGill University in Montreal . To Amnesty ...
... possible the final stages of work on the book . The continual re - emergence of the name " University of Pennsylvania " accurately suggests the ongoing support provided by my colleagues both in English and other fields . Research leaves ...
... possible to register alterations in the felt - experience of pain in one language may have no equivalent in a second language : thus Sophocles's agonized Philoctetes utters a cascade of changing cries and shrieks that in the original ...
... possible so that they can get around and behind it to the physical events themselves . But if the only external sign of the felt - experience of pain ( for which there is no alteration in the blood count , no shadow on the X ray , no ...
... possible . Ronald Melzack , who has with his colleague Patrick Wall authored the widely respected and celebrated " Gate- Control Theory of Pain , " has also with his colleague W. S. Torgerson developed the " Metiil Pain Questionnaire ...
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 |