John Lyne (University of Pittsburgh) just gave a talk here titled “Does Pain Have a Rhetoric?” It was excellent and thought provoking. Starting with the anecdote of a toddler who falls and then takes a moment for interpretation, by looking at his or audience, as he or she decides whether this was painful or not (or whether to express pain or not), Lyne moved into discussing a variety of difference concepts of pain, how perception of what pain is has changed over time, and about how pain is rhetorical: it is expressed differently depending on context and audience.
He referenced some books that sound fascinating: The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition by Arthur Kleinman, The Secret History of Emotion by Daniel Gross, and The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry. I look forward to reading these books sometime in the future, and looking for publications from Lyne and his graduate students who are writing on this topic.
Incidentally, a friend of mine just sent me a link to this bmezine page about a couple who cut off parts of their ring fingers instead of sharing wedding rings. Wow.
I highly recommend _The Body in Pain_. It changed how I thought about language and pain.
Thanks, Lani. From what Professor Lyne and others in the audience said, it sounds like an amazing book. Maybe it will be winter break reading for me.
You must have missed the blog entry I wrote linking to my year-long course this semester on pain!
http://seminaronpain.blogspot.com/
We read Scarry the first day and just finished Arthur Frank’s book on illness narratives. Next semester is a lecture series I’m coordinating (and I’ll be doing a lecture on rape jokes, referencing that Rate Your Students fiasco from earlier this year).
I must have missed that! Thanks for sharing, Nels!