Download or read book The Body in Pain written by Elaine Scarry and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1985 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Body in Pain is a profoundly original meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the literary, political, philosophical, medical, and religious vocabularies used to describe it. Elaine Scarry bases her analysis on a wide array of sources, including literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, and the writings of such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger. The author begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility, noting not only the difficulty of describing pain, but its ability to destroy a sufferer's language. She then analyzes the political consequences of deliberately inflicted pain, particularly in cases of war and torture, showing how regimes "unmake" an individual's world in their exercise of power. From the actions that "unmake" the world Scarry turns to a discussion of actions that "make" the world -- the acts of creativity that produce language and cultural artifacts. Book jacket.
Download or read book The Body in Pain The Making and Unmaking of the World written by Elaine Scarry and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1985-09-26 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Body in Pain written by Elaine Scarry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1985-09-26 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book On Beauty and Being Just written by Elaine Scarry and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms. Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness. Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.
Download or read book Thinking in an Emergency Norton Global Ethics Series written by Elaine Scarry and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning critic Elaine Scarry provides a vital new assessment of leadership during crisis that ensures the protection of democratic values. In Thinking in an Emergency, Elaine Scarry lays bare the realities of “emergency” politics and emphasizes what she sees as the ultimate ethical concern: “equality of survival.” She reveals how regular citizens can reclaim the power to protect one another and our democratic principles. Government leaders sometimes argue that the need for swift national action means there is no time for the population to think, deliberate, or debate. But Scarry shows that clear thinking and rapid action are not in opposition. Examining regions as diverse as Japan, Switzerland, Ethiopia, and Canada, Scarry identifies forms of emergency assistance that represent “thinking” at its most rigorous and remarkable. She draws on the work of philosophers, scientists, and artists to remind us of our ability to assist one another, whether we are called upon to perform acts of rescue as individuals, as members of a neighborhood, or as citizens of a country.
Download or read book Resisting Representation written by Elaine Scarry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-09-29 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned scholar Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain, has been called by Susan Sontag "extraordinary...large-spirited, heroically truthful." The Los Angeles Times called it "brilliant, ambitious, and controversial." Now Oxford has collected some of Scarry's most provocative writing. This collection of essays deals with the complicated problems of representation in diverse literary and cultural genres--from her beloved sixth-century philosopher Boethius, through the nineteenth-century novel, to twentieth-century advertising. qWe often assume that all areas of experience are equally available for representation. On the contrary, these essays present discussions of experiences and concepts that challenge, defeat, or block representation. Physical pain, physical labor, the hidden reflexes of cognition and its judgments about the coherence or incoherence of the world are all phenomena that test the resources of language. Using primarily literary sources (works by Hardy, Beckett, Boethius, Thackeray, and others), Scarry also draws on painting, medical advertising, and philosophic dialogue to probe the limitations of expression and representation. Resisting Representation celebrates language. It looks at the problematic areas of expression not at the moment when representation is resisted, but at the moment when that resistance is at last overcome, thus suggesting a domain of plenitude and inclusion.
Download or read book The Body written by Mariam Fraser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The body has become an increasingly significant concept in recent years and this Reader offers a stimulating overview of the main topics, perspectives and theories surrounding the issue. This broad consideration of the body presents an engagement with a range of social concerns, from the processes of racialization to the vagaries of fashion and performance art, enacted as surgery on the body. Individual sections cover issues such as: the body and social (dis)order bodies and identities bodily norms bodies in health and dis-ease bodies and technologies. Containing an extensive critical introduction, contributions from key figures such as Butler, Sedgwick, Martin Scheper-Huges, Haraway and Gilroy, and a series of introductions summarizing each section, this Reader offers students a valuable practical guide and a thorough grounding in the fascinating topic of the body.
Download or read book Making the Body Beautiful written by Sander L. Gilman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify. Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa. The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.
Download or read book Dreaming by the Book written by Elaine Scarry and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pathbreaking work about the way literature teaches us to use our imagination. We often attribute to our imaginative life powers that go beyond ordinary perception or sensation. In Dreaming by the Book, the noted scholar Elaine Scarry explores the apparently miraculous but in fact understandable processes by which poets and writers confer those powers on us: how they teach us the work of imaginative creation. Writers from Homer to Heaney, Scarry argues, instruct us in the art of mental composition even as their poems progress: just as painters understand paint, composers musical sounds, and sculptors stone or metal, verbal artists understand and deploy the only material in which their creations will get made - the backlit tissue of the human imagination. In her brilliant synthesis of cognitive psychology, literary criticism, and philosophy, she explores the five principal formal practices by which writers bring things to life for their readers; she calls them radiant ignition, rarity, dyadic addition and subtraction, stretching, and floral supposition. The transforming power of these mental practices can be seen in their appearance in great literature, of course, but also in applying them to - and watching how they revise - our own daydreams. Dreaming by the Book is not only an utterly original work of literary analysis but a sequence of on-the-spot mental experiments.
Download or read book Language Pangs written by Ilit Ferber and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We usually think about language and pain as opposites, the one being about expression and connection, the other destructive, "beyond words" so to speak, and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a radical reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness. Ilit Ferber's premise is that we cannot probe the experience of pain without taking account its inherent relation to language; and vice versa, that our understanding of the nature of language essentially depends on how we take account of its correspondence with pain. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts, an intersection that is especially productive in considering the phenomenology of pain and its bearing on language. Ferber explores a phenomenology of pain and its relation to language, before providing a unique close reading of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, the first modern philosophical text to consider language and pain, establishing the cry of pain as the origin of language. Herder also raises important claims regarding the relationship between human and animal, questions of sympathy and the role of hearing in the expression of pain. Beyond Herder, the book grapples with the work of other profound thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, and André Gide, and finally, Sophocles, from them weaving new insights on the experience of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing.
Download or read book Wave written by Sonali Deraniyagala and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.
Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Download or read book Understanding Pain written by Fernando Cervero and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expert explores the biological and emotional nature of pain: why it hurts and why some pain is good and some pain is bad. If you touch something hot, it hurts. You snatch your hand away from the hot thing immediately. Obviously. But what is really happening, biologically—and emotionally? In Understanding Pain, Fernando Cervero explores the mechanisms and the meaning of pain. When you touch something hot, your brain triggers a reflex action that causes you to withdraw your hand, protecting you from injury. That kind of pain, Cervero explains, is actually good for us; it acts as an alarm that warns us of danger and keeps us away from harm. But, Cervero tells us, not all pain is good for you. There is another kind of pain that is more like a curse: chronic pain that is not related to injury. This is the kind of pain that fills pain clinics and makes life miserable. Cervero describes current research into the mysteries of chronic pain and efforts to develop more effective treatments. Cervero reminds us that pain is the most common reason for people to seek medical attention, but that it remains a biological enigma. It is protective, but not always. Its effects are not only sensory but also emotional. There is no way to measure it objectively, no test that comes back positive for pain; the only way a medical professional can gauge pain is by listening to the patient's description of it. The idea of pain as a test of character or a punishment to be borne is changing; prevention and treatment of pain are increasingly important to researchers, clinicians, and patients. Cervero's account brings us closer to understanding the meaning of pain.
Download or read book Suffering from Realness written by Denise Markonish and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary artists examine the human condition from all sides in this riveting collection of American art that questions how we represent ourselves in the 21st century. In an age of national divisiveness, artists are creating moments of political resistance while also trying to forge paths towards reconciliation. This exciting and provocative collection shows how fifteen US-based multi-disciplinary artists are addressing the complexity of the 21st century. Jeffrey Gibson weaves together European and Native American cultures; performance artist Cassils constructs images of resistance in the Trans community; Hayv Kahraman examines diasporic culture and the effect of being a refugee in America. Together these artists create a national collective portrait of a country at odds. This book examines the human condition from all sides and strives to show how acting together against suffering can lead to a new version of realness. Copublished by MASS MoCA and DelMonico Books
Download or read book The Story of Pain written by Joanna Bourke and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of pain and suffering since the eighteenth century. Prize-winning historian Joanna Bourke charts how our understanding of pain (and how to cope with it) has changed completely over the last three centuries.
Download or read book Pain and Emotion in Modern History written by Robert Gregory Boddice and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the expertise of historical, literary and philosophical scholarship, practicing physicians, and the medical humanities this is a true interdisciplinary collaboration, styled as a history. It explores pain at the intersection of the living, suffering body, and the discursive cultural webs that entangle it in its specific moment.
Download or read book The Culture of Pain written by David B. Morris and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-09-09 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.
