Resisting Representation / Edition 1

by Elaine Scarry

Overview

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 for representation. On the contrary, these essays present discussions of experiences and concepts that challenge, defeat, or block representation. Physical pain, physical labor, the hidden reflexes of cognition and its judgments about the coherence or incoherence of the world are all phenomena that test the resources of language. Using primarily literary sources (works by Hardy, Beckett, Boethius, Thackeray, and others), Scarry also draws on painting, medical advertising, and philosophic dialogue to probe the limitations of expression and representation.

Resisting Representation celebrates language. It looks at the problematic areas of expression not at the moment when representation is resisted, but at the moment when that resistance is at last overcome, thus suggesting a domain of plenitude and inclusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195089646
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/29/1994
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	9.06(w) x 5.98(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Author of the renowned The Body in Pain (Oxford, 1985), noted scholar Elaine Scarry is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	3
1	Obdurate Sensation: Pain	13
	Willow Bark and Red Poppies: Advertising the Remedies for Physical Pain
2	Participial Acts: Working	49
	Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists
3	Nouns: The Realm of Things	91
	Six Ways To Kill a Blackbird (or Any Other Intentional Object) in Samuel Beckett
4	The External Referent: History	101
	Untransmissible History in Thackeray's Henry Esmond
5	The External Referent: Cosmic Order	143
	The Well-Rounded Sphere: Cognition and Metaphysical Structure in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy
	Acknowledgments	181
	Index	183

Editorial Reviews

"[Scarry's] thesis evokes instant recognition (‘I should have thought of that!'), and her readings of Hardy, Beckett, Thackeray, and Boethius are elegant and convincing. Resisting Representation made me see in a new way not only the works Scarry discusses, but also other literature; for a book of criticism, I can think of no higher praise."—Harvard Review

From the Publisher