Elaine Scarry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elaine Scarry (born 30 June 1946), a professor of English and American Literature and Language, 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 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.
As a writer and lecturer on civic questions ranging from plane crashes to nuclear weapons to the Patriot Act, Elaine Scarry has become an important public intellectual. (She discusses this public role in an interview in the book, Global Values 101, published by Beacon Press in 2006.)
Contents |
[edit] Education
- A.B., 1968, Chatham College
- A.M., Ph.D., 1974, University of Connecticut
[edit] Works
- Who Defended the Country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defense on 9/11 (2003)
- On Beauty and Being Just (1999)
- Dreaming by the Book, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999.
- Literature and the Body (1988)
- The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985.
- Resisting Representation (1994)
[edit] Editor
- Fins de Siècle (1995)
- Memory, Brain and Belief, eds. Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry, Harvard University Press, 2002.
[edit] Honors
- Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (2000) for Dreaming by the Book[1]
[edit] References
- New York Review of Books: Elaine Scarry
