1. Obdurate sensation: pain: Willow bark and red poppies: advertising the remedies for physical pain -- 2. Participial acts: working: Work and the body in Hardy and other nineteenth-century novelists -- 3. Nouns: the realm of things: Six ways to kill a blackbird (or any other intentional object) in Samuel Beckett -- 4. The external referent: history: Untransmissible history in Thackeray's Henry Esmond -- 5. The external referent: cosmic order: The well-rounded sphere: cognition and metaphysical structure in Boethius's Consolation of philosophy
Summary
Renowned scholar Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain, has been called by Susan Sontag "extraordinary ... large-spirited, heroically truthful." The Los Angeles Times called it "brilliant, ambitious, and controversial." Now Oxford has collected some of Scarry's most provocative writing. This collection of essays deals with the complicated problems of representation in diverse literary and cultural genres--from her beloved sixth-century philosopher Boethius, through the nineteenth-century novel, to twentieth-century advertising. qWe often assume that all areas of experience are equally available
