Knowledge and pain / edited by Esther Cohen ...[et. al.].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies.

Cohen, Esther.

Series:

At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries 84.

At the interface

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pain--Philosophy.

Pain.

Pain--Psychological aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (410 p.)

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Rodopi, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Pain studies, both in exact sciences and in the humanities, are a fast-shifting field. This volume condenses a spectrum of recent views of pain through the lens of humanistic studies. Methodologically, the volume is an interdisciplinary study of the questions pertaining to the accessibility of pain (physical or emotional) to understanding and of the possible influence of suffering on the enhancement of knowledge in private experience or public sphere. Undeterred by the widespread belief that pain cannot be expressed in language and that it is intransmissible to others, the authors of the essays in the collection show that the replicability of records and narratives of human experience provides a basis for the kind of empathetic attention, dialogue, and contact that can help us to register the pain of another and understand its conditions and contexts. Needless to say, the improvement of this understanding may also help map the ways for the ethics of response to (and help for) pain. Whereas the authors of the volume tend to share the view of pain as a totally negative phenomenon (the position taken in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain ), they hold this view applicable mainly to the attitudes to the pain of others and the imperative of minimise the causes of another’s suffering. They also consider this view to be culturally and temporally circumscribed. The volume suggests that one’s own personal experience of suffering, along with the awareness of the seriality of such experience among fellow sufferers, can be conducive to emotional and intellectual growth. The reading of literature dealing with pain can lead to similar results through vicariously experienced suffering, whose emotional corollaries and intellectual consequences may be conveyed through artistic rather than discursive means. The distinctive features of the volume are that it processes these issues in a historicising way, deploying the history of the ideas of pain from the Middle Ages to the present day, and that it makes use of the methodology of different disciplines to do so, arriving to similar conclusions through, as it were, different paths. The disciplines include analytic philosophy, historiography, history of science, oral history, literary studies, and political science.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Knowing Pain / S. Benjamin Fink

‘If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?’ Reflections on the Diminishing of the Other’s Pain / Esther Cohen

Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte’s Daughter in the Bible, the ‘Physician’s Tale’ and the Confessio Amantis / R. F. Yeager

Pain as Emotion: The Role of Emotional Pain in Fifteenth-Century Italian Medicine and Confession / Na’ama Cohen-Hanegbi

The Changing Faces of Love Torments: Continuity and Rupture in the Medical Diagnosis of Lovesickness in the Modern West / Michal Altbauer-Rudnik

The Rhetoric of Pain: Religious Convulsions and Miraculous Healings in the Jansenist Parish of Saint Médard, Paris (1727-1732) / Michèle Bokobza Kahan

The Limits of Enlightenment Sensitivity To the Suffering of Animals / Nathaniel Wolloch

Visceral Pleasures and Pains / Otniel E. Dror

The Code of Pain in Chekhov / Natalia Pervukhina-Kamyshnikova

After the Camps: Semantic Shift and the Experience of Pain / Manuela Consonni

Folk Theodicy in Concentration Camps: Literary Representations / Leona Toker

Pain and Blame: Psychological Approaches to Obstetric Pain, 1950-1980 / Paula A. Michaels

What Does Falling Ill Mean? Illness Narratives as Elucidation of Experience Expertise / Anna Leimumäki

Place and Space in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Life, End of / Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Representations of Dementia in Narrative Fiction / Rebecca Anna Bitenc

Fending Off Pain: David Grossman’s Labyrinth of Language / Nourit Melcer-Padon

Tangled Complicities: Extracting Knowledge from Images of Abu Ghraib / Rebecca A. Adelman

‘Sorting through My Grief and Putting It into Boxes’: Comics and Pain / Ariela Freedman

Abbreviations

Notes on Contributors.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

94-012-0857-3

1-283-86863-6

9789401208669

OCLC:

823389615

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401208574 DOI