Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry(born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value atHarvard 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 was formerly Professor of English at theUniversity of Pennsylvania.She is a recipient of theTruman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

Elaine Scarry
Born	(1946-06-30)June 30, 1946
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Chatham College University of Connecticut
Genre	Editor, Essays, Literary criticism
Notable awards	Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

Life

She is the author ofThe Body in Painwhich is known as a definitive study ofpainandinflicting 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.

In 1998, she delivered the essay 'On Beauty and Being Just', for theTanner Lectureson Human Values, an inquiry into the disparagement of beauty in western civilization in the twentieth century.

Her 1999 study,Dreaming by the Bookwon theTruman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

In 2014, she published a book aboutnuclear weapons,Thermonuclear Monarchy,in which she 'explores the baleful political consequences of limiting the control of nuclear weapons to a select few, and the authority to launch them to even fewer – in the case of the United States, to the president alone in what amounts to his monarchical power.'

Hypotheses on plane crashes

Further information:TWA Flight 800 conspiracy theories § Electromagnetic interference

In 1998, Elaine Scarry authored an articleThe Fall ofTWA 800:The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interferencewhich appeared inThe New York Review of Books.The article's basic hypothesis – which does not enjoy support from most scientists or engineers – is thatelectromagnetic interferencefrom aP-3 Orionaircraft may have been responsible for the center fuel tank explosion during that flight in 1996. Scarry subsequently published another article hypothesizing that another plane crash, that ofEgyptAir 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 inThe New York Review of Bookson October 5, 2000. In a critique of Professor Scarry's hypothesis, Professor Didier de Fontaine, Professor Emeritus atUC 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

Honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship(1987), Philosophy
• Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism(2000) forDreaming by the Book
• Elected Member,American Philosophical Society(2013)
• Honorary doctoratefromUppsala University,Sweden(2018)

Works

Books

• Naming thy name: cross talk in Shakespeare's sonnets.Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016.ISBN9780374279936.
• Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom.W. W. Norton. 2014.ISBN9780393089929.
• Thinking in an Emergency.W. W. Norton. 2011.ISBN9780393081046.
• Rule of Law, Misrule of Men.Boston Review Books. 2010.ISBN9780262265775.
• Who Defended the Country? A New Democracy Forum on Authoritarian versus Democratic Approaches to National Defense on 9/11.Beacon Press. 2003.ISBN9780807004579.
• On Beauty and Being Just,Princeton University Press, 1999,ISBN9780691048758
• Dreaming by the Book.Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1999.ISBN9780691070766.
• Resisting Representation.Oxford University Press. 1994.ISBN9780198025023.Elaine Scarry.
• Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons,Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990,ISBN9780801836046
• The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.Oxford University Press. 1985.ISBN9780195049961.

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)
• On Beauty and Being Just

Editor

• Daniel L. Schacter; Elaine Scarry, eds. (2002).Memory, Brain and Belief.Harvard University Press.ISBN9780674007192.
• Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990,Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995,ISBN9780801849282

External links

• New York Review of Books:Elaine Scarry
• Profile in The Chronicle of Higher EducationbyNathan Schneider