Preview
  • The Body in Pain

  • The Making and Unmaking of the World
  • By: Elaine Scarry
  • Narrated by: Joyce Bean
  • Length: 18 hrs and 32 mins
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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The Body in Pain

By: Elaine Scarry
Narrated by: Joyce Bean
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Publisher's summary

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.

©1985 Oxford University Press, Inc. (P)2021 Tantor
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What listeners say about The Body in Pain

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The body In pain; Reviewed by someone in pain

This book is highly academic - I having a BA in communication find it a fairly difficult read — so i purchased the audio book and IT IS VERY ROBOTIC sounding which is fairly upsetting but hopefully I will get over that

This book does have a great layout to help those in chronic pain to understand their pain

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Not really a book on pain

This is really not a book on pain as only about 5% is on pain. This is more an anti-war book dealing with ridding the world of war and torture as a means to an end. I was very disappointed. I do not recommend.

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Long on words short on thesis

A lot of saying the obvious and predicting the subject of other chapters. Even listening becomes tedious.

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