Suffering and the remedy of art
By: Harold Schweizer.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
Subjects: Suffering in literature.; Suffering in art.
Description: This book suggests that a listening to suffering may profit from a literary hearing, and vice versa. It is not only that literature tells of suffering but that suffering may tell us something about the nature of literature.

The author examines works and texts that range from medicine to literature, philosophy to photography, prose to poetry, and from Antigone to W. H. Auden.

The book presents individual instances, real and literary, of physical and mental wounds and diseases, of pain and death, endured by a little girl in a burn ward, a boy wounded in the war in Bosnia, a nameless Vietnamese woman, Job, Antigone; as well as a number of mostly lyrical elegists: a survivor of the Holocaust, a wife bereft of her husband, a daughter bereft of her father. The autonomy of each chapter suggests that experiences of suffering are always incomparable.

One must in every instance begin again and enter the scene of suffering on its own terms: the radically individual nature of suffering is prior or past to any theory or set of generalizations.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.