Elaine Scarry
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is the author of The Body in Pain which is known as a definitive study of pain and inflicting pain.
She argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world, whereas human creation at the opposite end of the spectrum leads to the making of the world.
See
- Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990,