Elaine Scarry

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.

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.

In 1998, Elaine Scarry authored an article The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference which appeared in The New York Review of Books. The article's basic theory - which does not enjoy support from most scientists or engineers - is that electromagnetic interference from a P-3 Orion aircraft may have been responsible for the center fuel tank explosion. Scarry subsequently published another article hypothesizing that another infamous plane crash, that of EgyptAir 990, was caused by electromagnetic interference of the type that could result from transmission from a military source in the vicinity of the crash. This article, entitled "The Fall of EgyptAir 990," was also published in The New York Review of Books, October 5, 2000. In a critique of Professor Scarry's hypothesis, Professor Didier de Fontaine, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, discusses what he views as the less than scientific basis of Scarry's "unfriendly skies" scenarios, and concludes that she has engaged in "voodoo science." .

Education

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

Works

Books

• Thinking in an Emergency (W. W. Norton, 2011)
• Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (Boston Review Books, 2010)
• Who Defended the Country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defense on 9/11 (Beacon Press, 2003)
• On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 1999)
• Dreaming by the Book (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999)
• Resisting Representation (Oxford University Press, 1994)
• Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
• The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985)

Essays

• The Fall of EgyptAir 990 (The New York Review of Books, 2000)
• The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference (The New York Review of Books, 1998)

Editor

• Memory, Brain and Belief, eds. Daniel L. Schacter and Elaine Scarry (Harvard University Press, 2002)
• Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Honors

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

References

• New York Review of Books: Elaine Scarry
• cbc.ca (accessed 22 Apr 2007)