This book suggests that a listening to suffering may profit from a literary hearing, and vice versa. It is not only that literature tells of suffering but that suffering may tell us something about the nature of literature The author examines works...
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This book suggests that a listening to suffering may profit from a literary hearing, and vice versa. It is not only that literature tells of suffering but that suffering may tell us something about the nature of literature The author examines works and texts that range from medicine to literature, philosophy to photography, prose to poetry, and from Antigone to W. H. Auden. The book presents individual instances, real and literary, of physical and mental wounds and diseases, of pain and death, endured by a little girl in a burn ward, a boy wounded in the war in Bosnia, a nameless Vietnamese woman, Job, Antigone; as well as a number of mostly lyrical elegists: a survivor of the Holocaust, a wife bereft of her husband, a daughter bereft of her father. The autonomy of each chapter suggests that experiences of suffering are always incomparable. One must in every instance begin again and enter the scene of suffering on its own terms: the radically individual nature of suffering is prior or past to any theory or set of generalizations
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references and index
1. To Give Suffering a Language. Literature and Medicine. Arthur Kleinman's Case of the Little Girl -- 2. Coverings/Apertures: The Invisibility of Suffering. Barthes on Photography. The Newsweek Cover of May 10, 1993. P.J. Griffiths' Photograph -- 3. Suffering as Metaphor. Nietzsche's Remedy of Art. Freud's Narrative Cure -- 4. Job or the Meaninglessness of Suffering. Job's Silence. Job Speaking. God Speaking. Job's Restitution -- 5. Antigone or the Secrecy of Suffering. Antigone's Suffering. Kierkegaard's Antigone. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Antigone. Antigone's Suicide -- 6. Lear or the Causelessness of Suffering. Suffering Love -- 7. Matthew Arnold: The Modern Painful. Modern Problems. Beyond Tragedy -- 8. Robinson Jeffers' Aesthetic of Pain. Nature. The Shining. The Unavailability of Tragedy -- 9. Lyric Suffering in W.H. Auden and Irving Feldman. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" Feldman's "Bystander at the Massacre" -- 10. Paul Celan: Suffering in Translation
This book suggests that a listening to suffering may profit from a literary hearing, and vice versa. It is not only that literature tells of suffering but that suffering may tell us something about the nature of literature
The author examines works and texts that range from medicine to literature, philosophy to photography, prose to poetry, and from Antigone to W.H. Auden. The book presents individual instances, real and literary, of physical and mental wounds and diseases, of pain and death, endured by a little girl in a burn ward, a boy wounded in the war in Bosnia, a nameless Vietnamese woman, Job, Antigone; as well as a number of mostly lyrical elegists: a survivor of the Holocaust, a wife bereft of her husband, a daughter bereft of her father. The autonomy of each chapter suggests that experiences of suffering are always incomparable. One must in every instance begin again and enter the scene of suffering on its own terms: the radically individual nature of suffering is prior or past to any theory or set of generalizations
