Witness to Pain : Essays on the Translation of Pain into Art

On writing our pain we inevitably write about the past because it is impossible to produce art in situations of acute physical pain. As Elaine Scarry has convincingly argued in The Body in Pain, during severe illness individuals spontaneously lose the means to convey their feelings and emotions. So the art of pain inevitably comes from a witness to this pain, i.e. doctors, sympathetic onlookers and ex-patients who examine their pain once it has remitted. This interdisciplinary collection of essays identifies as its core issues the translation of pain into art, the (im)possibility of finding your own voice in situations of pain, and the presumed therapeutic power of the artistic representation of pain. This volume assembles contributions from scholars in New Zealand, Canada, The United States, Germany, Portugal, Sweden and Spain. Photographs, films, paintings, fictional narratives, autobiographies and poems on pain are analyzed using a variety of critical approaches and different perspectives that range from structuralism to psychoanalysis.