Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body

Description

Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body examines the strategies authors have used to portray bodies in pain, drawing on a diverse range of literary texts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Susannah B. Mintz provides readings of canonical writers including John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Samuel Beckett, alongside contemporary writers such as Ana Castillo and Margaret Edson, focusing on how pain is shaped according to the conventions―and also experiments―of genre: poetry, memoir, drama, and fiction. With insights from disability theory and recent studies of the language of pain, Mintz delivers an important corrective to our most basic fears of physical suffering, revealing through literature that pain can be a source of connection, compassion, artistry, and knowledge. Not only an important investigation of authors' formal and rhetorical choices, Hurt and Pain reveals how capturing pain in literature can become a fundamental component of crafting human experience. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Shaping Pain Notes Chapter 1: The Poetry of Pain The agonies of love Filling in the blanks: Dickinson’s trickster pain “The shawleries of morphine”: Pharmaceutical pain17 Notes Chapter 2: Our Stories, Our Pain Pain in lyrical prose The imaginative work of pain Pain as denouement Notes Chapter 3: The Drama of Pain Beckett’s elementary bodies From witness to wittiness Shock effect: Bob Flanagan and ORLAN Notes Chapter 4: The Path of Pain Pain scale as plot device Jean Stewart: Plaintiff/ve pain Ana Castillo: Doing pain “crippled girl style” Notes Chapter 5: Bystander Pain Whipping girl: Writing the infliction of pain Pain as lament: Mark Doty Writing Without: Pain as lyrical absence Notes References Index