Elaine Scarry
{{Short description|American academic}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=March 2016}}
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| nationality = American
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| alma_mater = Chatham College
University of Connecticut
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| genre = Editor, Essays, Literary criticism
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| awards = Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
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Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Life
She is the author of The Body in Pain which is known as a definitive study of pain and inflicting pain.Pollock, Della. Telling Bodies, Performing Birth. 1999: Columbia University Press. p. 120.
She argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world, whereas human creation at the opposite end of the spectrum leads to the making of the world.
In 1998, she delivered the essay 'On Beauty and Being Just', for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an inquiry into the disparagement of beauty in western civilization in the twentieth century.
Her 1999 study, Dreaming by the Book won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
In 2014, she published a book about nuclear weapons, Thermonuclear Monarchy, in which she 'explores the baleful political consequences of limiting the control of nuclear weapons to a select few, and the authority to launch them to even fewer – in the case of the United States, to the president alone in what amounts to his monarchical power.'Richard Rhodes, The New York Times, March 2014, 21: [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/books/review/thermonuclear-monarchy-by-elaine-scarry.html]
= Hypotheses on plane crashes =
{{Details|TWA Flight 800 conspiracy theories#Electromagnetic interference}}
In 1998, Elaine Scarry authored an article The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference which appeared in The New York Review of Books. The article's basic hypothesis – which does not enjoy support from most scientists or engineers – is that electromagnetic interference from a P-3 Orion aircraft may have been responsible for the center fuel tank explosion during that flight in 1996. Scarry subsequently published another article hypothesizing that another plane crash, that of EgyptAir 990, was caused by electromagnetic interference of the type that could result from transmission from a military source in the vicinity of the crash. This article, entitled "The Fall of EgyptAir 990", was also published in The New York Review of Books on October 5, 2000. In a critique of Professor Scarry's hypothesis, Professor Didier de Fontaine, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, discusses what he views as the less than scientific basis of Scarry's "unfriendly skies" scenarios, and concludes that she has engaged in "voodoo science"."Concerning the Fall of TWA 800, Swissair 111 and EgyptAir 990: The Unfriendly Skies Scenario," Didier de Fontaine. http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/faculty/deFontaine/CommentaryIII.html {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110719144255/http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/faculty/deFontaine/CommentaryIII.html |date=July 19, 2011 }}
Education
- A.B., 1968, Chatham College
- A.M., Ph.D., 1974, University of Connecticut
Honors
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), Philosophy{{cite web|title=Elaine Scarry |url=http://www.gf.org/fellows/12953-elaine-scarry |work=John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation |access-date=May 6, 2014 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140507031226/http://www.gf.org/fellows/12953-elaine-scarry |archive-date=May 7, 2014 |df=mdy }}
- Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (2000) for Dreaming by the Book{{Cite web |url=http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/04.06/capote.html |title=Elaine Scarry and Philip Fisher Share Capote Literary Award |access-date=September 19, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060903150205/http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/04.06/capote.html |archive-date=September 3, 2006 |url-status=dead |df=mdy-all }}
- Elected Member, American Philosophical Society (2013){{cite web |url=https://www.amphilsoc.org/members/electedApril2013 |title=Newly Elected - April 2013 | American Philosophical Society |access-date=2014-03-18 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140403002431/https://www.amphilsoc.org/members/electedApril2013 |archive-date=April 3, 2014 |df=mdy-all }}
- Honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden (2018) {{Cite web|url=https://uu.se/en/about-uu/traditions/prizes/honorary-doctorates/theology/|title = Honorary Doctors of the Faculty of Theology - Uppsala University, Sweden| date=June 8, 2023 }}
Works
=Books=
- {{Cite book|title=Naming thy name : cross talk in Shakespeare's sonnets|publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux|year=2016|isbn=9780374279936}}
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YgTGAgAAQBAJ |title=Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom |publisher=W. W. Norton |year=2014 |isbn=9780393089929}}
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FVyEZ9kFLuEC&q=Elaine+Scarry&pg=PR8 |title=Thinking in an Emergency |publisher=W. W. Norton |year=2011 |isbn=9780393081046}}
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3hTc4iwtc_oC&q=Elaine+Scarry |title=Rule of Law, Misrule of Men |publisher=Boston Review Books |year=2010 |isbn=9780262265775}}
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P6ktfSfIO0AC&q=Elaine+Scarry |title=Who Defended the Country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defense on 9/11 |publisher=Beacon Press |year=2003 |isbn=9780807004579}}
- On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, 1999, {{ISBN|9780691048758}}
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=djGHh3Qvx48C&q=Elaine+Scarry |title=Dreaming by the Book |publisher=Farrar, Straus & Giroux |year=1999 |isbn=9780691070766}}
- {{cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/resistingreprese00scar |url-access=registration |quote=Elaine Scarry. |title=Resisting Representation |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1994 |isbn=9780198025023}}
- Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, {{ISBN|9780801836046}}
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NEaz8I0KAk4C&q=Elaine+Scarry |title=The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1985 |isbn=9780195049961}}
=Essays=
- [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/oct/05/the-fall-of-egyptair-990/ The Fall of EgyptAir 990] (The New York Review of Books, 2000)
- [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/oct/05/twa-800-and-electromagnetic-interference-work-alre/ The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference] (The New York Review of Books, 1998)
- On Beauty and Being Just
=Editor=
- {{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=APJsoU9PNisC&q=Elaine+Scarry&pg=PA1 |title=Memory, Brain and Belief |editor1=Daniel L. Schacter |editor2=Elaine Scarry |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2002 |isbn=9780674007192}}
- Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, {{ISBN|9780801849282}}
References
External links
- New York Review of Books: [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/485 Elaine Scarry]
- [https://chronicle.com/article/A-Literary-Scholars-Voice-in/144733/ Profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education] by Nathan Schneider
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scarry, Elaine}}
Category:Harvard University faculty
Category:University of Connecticut alumni
Category:Chatham University alumni
Category:American academics of English literature
Category:American literary theorists
Category:Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
Category:American women essayists
Category:20th-century American essayists
Category:20th-century American women writers
Category:21st-century American essayists
Category:21st-century American women writers