The Paris Review Covers the Life and Work of Elaine Scarry

The Paris Review interviewed Professor Elaine Scarry for its series on non-fiction voices in modern literature. An excerpt from the interview is included below. 

INTERVIEWER: Not many literary scholars have written books on torture, war, and nuclear abolition. How do you see the two sides of your work fitting together?

ELAINE SCARRY: I see my writing on imagination and on war as continuous. Or rather, the two subjects are essentially locked in combat, because the act of inflicting injury or pain is really a willful aping of imagination, turning it upside down and appropriating it. The Body in Pain and On Beauty and Being Just are about both willful injuring and creation, but I’m sometimes writing about just one or the other—as in, let’s say, the articles on electromagnetic interference for The New York Review of Books, or, on the other hand, when I look at verb forms in Emily Brontë. But because they’re parts of a larger architecture, they seem to me to go together.

Read more here.