Pain is notoriously tricky. Pain is central to the human condition, but its very nature—at once biological, cultural, and social—slips easily from grasp. Recent events like the murder of George Floyd and, more broadly, the public spectacle of recorded Black pain, the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee crisis, and the opioid crisis have moved problems of pain and its representation to the fore.
The moment is ripe to reevaluate pain in literary and cultural studies. Thirty-five years after its publication, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) remains a cornerstone of pain studies, as scholars continue to read the experience of pain through its diptych: pain “unmakes” the world of the subject by destroying language even as it “makes” art and culture from emotional, psychological, and physical suffering. Pain destroys, but it also creates. Pain exhausts as much as it enrages, inflames, and inspires. From narratives of enslavement to sentimental fictions—from...
