The contemporary making and unmaking of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain

[First paragraph] 2015 marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Elaine Scarry’s The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world (1985). Immediately recognised as a persuasive and original exploration of embodied experience (Goldsmith, 1985; Kolenda, 1988), this study was subsequently described as ‘classic’ (Zhang, 2014) and ‘monumental’ (Bourke, 2011). At the close of the 20th century, no less than Edward Said (1999, cited in Douglass and Wilderson, 2013) stated that “[t]here is no one even remotely like Elaine Scarry for the depth of originality of her thinking in the humanities today”. However, responses to Scarry’s text have definitely not always been enthusiastic; critics have indicated her inaccuracies, omissions and methodological and argumentative peculiarity (for example, Singer in 1986 criticised Scarry for ignoring the standards of argument) while others, as Harpham (2001) points out, have been bluntly dismissive.