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.

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

This book is intended to encourage people to become better readers of the Bible. It takes a brief journey through the Gospel of John, highlighting well-known passages, both brief and extended, with the threefold purpose of growing deeper in our theological, literary and historical understanding of God's Word.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION "The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." —Sally Rooney, author of Normal People "Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations

Suffering and politics in the thought of Luther, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche.

Theological discourse in the West has consistently valued the word over the image. Aesthetics, which discerns the criteria and value of the beautiful and what "pleases the senses," is the discipline that prioritizes sensual intelligence over the rational; this book advocates a reconsideration of the doctrine of the incarnation through an aesthetics of vulnerability, in which the ethical optics of attention to the vulnerable other becomes the standpoint in which to ponder the significance of "God became human." Relying on such diverse thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Karl Rahner, and Masao Abe, Susie Paulik Babka explores visual art, images, and poetry as theological sources, designating what Blanchot called "a region where impossibility is no longer deprivation, but affirmation."

Contributors give contemporary presence to Asian studies through a variety of themes and topics in this multidisciplined and interdisciplinary volume. In an era of globalization, scholars trained in Western traditions increasingly see the need to add materials and perspectives that have been lacking in the past. Accessibly written and void of jargon, this work provides an adaptable entrée to Asia for the integration of topics into courses in the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, and global studies. Guiding principles, developed at the East-West Center, include noting uncommon differences, the interplay among Asian societies and traditions, the erosion of authenticity and cultural tradition as an Asian phenomenon as well as a Western one, and the possibilities Asian concepts offer for conceiving culture outside Asian contexts. The work ranges from South to Southeast to East Asia. Essays deal with art, aesthetics, popular culture, religion, geopolitical realities, geography, history, and contemporary times.