Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

Ranging from cognitive, neurological, and pathological perspectives on memory and belief, to relations between conscious and nonconscious mental processes, to memory and belief in autobiographical narratives, this book will be uniquely stimulating to scholars in several academic disciplines.

In Les Fins de Siècle Elaine Scarry brings together an eminent group of contributors to examine a subject that increasingly occupies our thoughts as this century--and this millennium--approaches an end. Arranged chronologically, the chapters treat English poetry and culture at successive turns-of-the-century. The result is a rich picture of the ways calendar and culture affect one another. Even if we must pass through our own century's turn "unprotected," these pictures from the past provide an array of models that may prove useful: the book shows us portraits of the fin de siècle as a radical invitation to political distribution (Braudy), as a prolonged kiss (McGann), as an assassin (Vendler), and even as an Hegelian reader, "curled up in an easy chair" wishing to exempt itself from the rest of the century (de Grazia). The number of great poets who wrote at their century's end--Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare--works to deepen our attention to the poetry now emerging in the 1990s.