The Culture of Pain

by David B. Morris

Overview

This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe—as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought—that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.  
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520082762
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/12/1993
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David B. Morris resigned in 1982 from the University of Iowa, where he was professor of English, to move to Michigan and devote himself to writing. An earlier book, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984), won the Gottshalk Price of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Table of Contents

Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction

I
LIVING PAIN: MYSTERY OR PUZZLE?
2
THE MEANINGS OF PAIN
3
AN INVISIBLE EPIDEMIC
4
THE PAIN OF COMEDY
5
HYSTERIA, PAIN, AND GENDER
6
VISIONARY PAIN AND THE POLITICS
OF SUFFERING
7
PAIN IS ALWAYS IN YOUR HEAD
8
THE USES OF PAIN
9
PAINFUL PLEASURES: BEAUTY AND
AFFLICTION
10
SEX, PAIN, AND THE MARQUIS DE SADE 224
11
TRAGIC PAIN
12
THE FUTURE OF PAIN

Notes
Index
CONTENTS