Knowledge and pain / / edited by Esther Cohen ...[et. al.].

• Author: Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies
• TeilnehmendeR: Cohen, Esther.; Scholion--Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies
• 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.

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.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Knowing Pain / S. Benjamin Fink -- ‘If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?’ Reflections on the Diminishing of the Other’s Pain / Esther Cohen -- Gower and Chaucer on Pain and Suffering: Jephte’s Daughter in the Bible, the ‘Physician’s Tale’ and the Confessio Amantis / R. F. Yeager -- Pain as Emotion: The Role of Emotional Pain in Fifteenth-Century Italian Medicine and Confession / Na’ama Cohen-Hanegbi -- The Changing Faces of Love Torments: Continuity and Rupture in the Medical Diagnosis of Lovesickness in the Modern West / Michal Altbauer-Rudnik -- The Rhetoric of Pain: Religious Convulsions and Miraculous Healings in the Jansenist Parish of Saint Médard, Paris (1727-1732) / Michèle Bokobza Kahan -- The Limits of Enlightenment Sensitivity To the Suffering of Animals / Nathaniel Wolloch -- Visceral Pleasures and Pains / Otniel E. Dror -- The Code of Pain in Chekhov / Natalia Pervukhina-Kamyshnikova -- After the Camps: Semantic Shift and the Experience of Pain / Manuela Consonni -- Folk Theodicy in Concentration Camps: Literary Representations / Leona Toker -- Pain and Blame: Psychological Approaches to Obstetric Pain, 1950-1980 / Paula A. Michaels -- What Does Falling Ill Mean? Illness Narratives as Elucidation of Experience Expertise / Anna Leimumäki -- Place and Space in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Life, End of / Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan -- Representations of Dementia in Narrative Fiction / Rebecca Anna Bitenc -- Fending Off Pain: David Grossman’s Labyrinth of Language / Nourit Melcer-Padon -- Tangled Complicities: Extracting Knowledge from Images of Abu Ghraib / Rebecca A. Adelman -- ‘Sorting through My Grief and Putting It into Boxes’: Comics and Pain / Ariela Freedman -- Abbreviations -- Notes on Contributors.