Knowledge and pain / / edited by Esther Cohen [and others].

• Superior document: At the interface/probing the boundaries ; v. 84
• Author: Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies
• TeilnehmendeR: Cohen, Esther, 1947 December 21-; Toker, Leona,; Consonni, Manuela M.,; Dror, Otniel Yizhak, 1960-; Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam ;, New York, NY : : Rodopi,, 2012.
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries 84.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (410 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.
• Other title: Preliminary Material --; Knowing Pain /; ‘If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?’ Reflections on the Diminishing of the Other’s Pain /; Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte’s Daughter in the Bible, the ‘Physician’s Tale’ and the Confessio Amantis /; Pain as Emotion: The Role of Emotional Pain in Fifteenth-Century Italian Medicine and Confession /; The Changing Faces of Love Torments: Continuity and Rupture in the Medical Diagnosis of Lovesickness in the Modern West /; The Rhetoric of Pain: Religious Convulsions and Miraculous Healings in the Jansenist Parish of Saint Médard, Paris (1727-1732) /; The Limits of Enlightenment Sensitivity To the Suffering of Animals /; Visceral Pleasures and Pains /; The Code of Pain in Chekhov /; After the Camps: Semantic Shift and the Experience of Pain /; Folk Theodicy in Concentration Camps: Literary Representations /; Pain and Blame: Psychological Approaches to Obstetric Pain, 1950-1980 /; What Does Falling Ill Mean? Illness Narratives as Elucidation of Experience Expertise /; Place and Space in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Life, End of /; Representations of Dementia in Narrative Fiction /; Fending Off Pain: David Grossman’s Labyrinth of Language /; Tangled Complicities: Extracting Knowledge from Images of Abu Ghraib /; ‘Sorting through My Grief and Putting It into Boxes’: Comics and Pain /; Abbreviations --; Notes on Contributors.
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references.
• ISBN: 9401208573; 1283868636; 9789401208669
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: edited by Esther Cohen [and others].

Pain studies, both in exact sciences and in the humanities, are a fast-shifting field. This volume condenses a spectrum of recent views of pain through the lens of humanistic studies. Methodologically, the volume is an interdisciplinary study of the questions pertaining to the accessibility of pain (physical or emotional) to understanding and of the possible influence of suffering on the enhancement of knowledge in private experience or public sphere. Undeterred by the widespread belief that pain cannot be expressed in language and that it is intransmissible to others, the authors of the essays in the collection show that the replicability of records and narratives of human experience provides a basis for the kind of empathetic attention, dialogue, and contact that can help us to register the pain of another and understand its conditions and contexts. Needless to say, the improvement of this understanding may also help map the ways for the ethics of response to (and help for) pain. Whereas the authors of the volume tend to share the view of pain as a totally negative phenomenon (the position taken in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain ), they hold this view applicable mainly to the attitudes to the pain of others and the imperative of minimise the causes of another’s suffering. They also consider this view to be culturally and temporally circumscribed. The volume suggests that one’s own personal experience of suffering, along with the awareness of the seriality of such experience among fellow sufferers, can be conducive to emotional and intellectual growth. The reading of literature dealing with pain can lead to similar results through vicariously experienced suffering, whose emotional corollaries and intellectual consequences may be conveyed through artistic rather than discursive means. The distinctive features of the volume are that it processes these issues in a historicising way, deploying the history of the ideas of pain from the Middle Ages to the present day, and that it makes use of the methodology of different disciplines to do so, arriving to similar conclusions through, as it were, different paths. The disciplines include analytic philosophy, historiography, history of science, oral history, literary studies, and political science.