Elaine Scarry (born 30 June 1946), a professor of English and American Literature and Language, 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. June 30 is the 181st day of the year (182nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full 1946 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ...

She is the author of The Body in Pain which is known as a definitive study of pain and inflicting pain. 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.

Her 1999 study, Dreaming by the Book won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

As a writer and lecturer on civic questions ranging from plane crashes to nuclear weapons to the Patriot Act, Elaine Scarry has become an important public intellectual. (She discusses this public role in an interview in the book, Global Values 101, published by Beacon Press in 2006.)

Education

• A.B., 1968, Chatham College
• A.M., Ph.D., 1974, University of Connecticut

Chatham College is a small (1,200 undergraduate and graduate students) liberal arts college located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvanias neighborhood Squirrel Hill . ... The University of Connecticut, commonly known as UConn, is the State of Connecticuts land-grant university. ...

Works

• Who Defended the Country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defense on 9/11 (2003)
• On Beauty and Being Just (1999)
• Dreaming by the Book, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999.
• Literature and the Body (1988)
• The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Resisting Representation (1994)

Editor

• Fins de Siècle (1995)
• Memory, Brain and Belief, eds. Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry, Harvard University Press, 2002.

Honors

• Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (2000) for Dreaming by the Book[1]

The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the estate of Truman Capote. ...

Trivia

• Scarry does not use e-mail.

References

• Carnegie Council Discussion: The Question of Torture
• New York Review of Books: Elaine Scarry
• cbc.ca (accessed 22 Apr 2007)