The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world / Elaine Scarry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scarry, Elaine.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pain.

War.

Torture.

Physical Description:

vii, 385 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1985.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Part 1 Unmaking

Chapter 1 The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power 27

Chapter 2 The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues 60

Part 2 Making

Chapter 3 Pain and Imagining 161

Chapter 4 The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into 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:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0195049969

0195036018 :

OCLC:

12285656