Resisting Representation

by Elaine Scarry

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.

We 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Art

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[سیــــــاوش · Rating 3 out of 5]

Resisting Representation by Elaine Scarry can be seen as a conceptual continuation of The Body in Pain, exploring similar themes of pain, embodiment, and the limits of language. Whereas The Body in Pain focuses intensely on the phenomenology of suffering and the lived experience of the body under torture or illness, Resisting Representation expands this inquiry to broader cultural and literary domains.

In this book Scarry examines how pain, objects, history, and the cosmos resist full representation, using examples from literature, philosophy, and advertising. In a sense, it can be considered a “fuller” or more comprehensive treatment of some of the questions first raised in The Body in Pain, because it situates the body’s resistance within historical, social, and cultural frameworks.

However, unlike The Body in Pain, which is intensely visceral and immediate, Resisting Representation can initially feel more analytical and abstract, as it often focuses on literary and historical analysis rather than raw bodily experience. For readers familiar with Scarry’s first book, it promises to deepen and broaden the investigation of pain’s incommunicability and the tension between experience and representation.

In short Resisting Representation is not a replacement for The Body in Pain, but a complementary and more expansive exploration, ideal for those interested in how literature, culture, and philosophy attempt and fail to capture the reality of bodily experience.

[Elena K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun few essays exploring if/how we can represent the artifacts that make/unmake our worlds

"Yet if in tracing the intricacies in the interior of courtship it is really the interior of created objects (or even, the interior of the imagination) whose secret shape we seek, the subject of human work, human labor, provides at least as rich an occasion for exploration; for while there is an initial analogical leap required in seeking the kinship between 'making a marriage' and 'making a book,' almost none is required (as Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe long ago made clear) in 'making a house' and 'making a book,' or 'making a table or a journal or a whole new world on an island' and 'making a book.'"