#  The Paris Review Covers the Life and Work of Elaine Scarry 

 





September 05, 2024

 

 

*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](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__harvard.us8.list-2Dmanage.com_track_click-3Fu-3D3e63caf7f5b663a9e9e1d8997-26id-3D32510f64d5-26e-3Df5c28fb52c&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=McmKCCxOpnPTmUHULBMgBI_p0Yb2Tp5pINS9IH0GwYo&m=AVTjOnwC7kXhlJaSsop1gtme12-RNpYlRgbZ69t1x5bCKiwIOv4CxPcAELKLoc7S&s=V06JRwGe-wnRFRZDj-1Xr6fuF2SDGHDWMzWdGLbEOMY&e=).



 

 

 



 

 

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