Books by Elaine Scarry
Dreaming by the Book
by Elaine Scarry
When you’re reading Homer or Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy you have a sharp visual image in your mind. Scarry is writing, in a way very technically, about what techniques she thinks writers are using to have this evocative effect.
The Body in Pain
by Elaine Scarry
This book left a profound mark on me and actually inspired me to write about pain myself. I love its thoughtfulness and poetic style, its interdisciplinary nature and the fact that a scholar of literature has so much to say about the world outside the academy. She writes about how pain radically separates the sufferer from the observer of pain. For the sufferer, pain is the prototype of certainty – there’s no way to doubt that you have pain. But it is the exact opposite for those who observe a person in pain. How can we be really sure another person is in pain? Scarry then goes on to explore the far-reaching consequences of these two observations, in medicine, in torture, and in war.
Interviews where books by Elaine Scarry were recommended
The best books on Pain, recommended by David Biro
The professor of dermatology talks about the ferocious inwardness and aching solitude of pain. Pain destroys language, reducing the sufferer to a pre-linguistic state: to primal screams
Rachel Cohen on Writing About Art
Good writing about visual experience allows us to see things we otherwise wouldn’t, says Rachel Cohen. The author picks some of her own favourite books about art.
