Elaine Scarry.

Biography

Elaine Scarry is an American essayist, researcher and professor specialising in literature, aesthetics and value theory. She holds the Walter M. Cabot Professorship of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her work examines the relationships between bodily experience, language, imagination, material creation, justice and political consent.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), she studied the difficulty of expressing physical pain and how torture and war can undo the conditions of a shared world. In Resisting Representation (1994), Dreaming by the Book (1999) and On Beauty and Being Just (1999), she explored representation, literary imagination and the relationship between the experience of beauty and justice.

Her thought has also extended to democratic institutions and military power, as demonstrated by Thinking in an Emergency (2011) and Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (2014). From a perspective connecting the humanities, ethics and politics, Scarry has contributed to thinking about the vulnerability of the body and the conditions that make repair and creation possible.