On Beauty and Being Just
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"With exemplary clarity, Elaine Scarry argues that admiring the beautiful is nothing to be ashamed of; that on the contrary beauty fosters the spirit of justice. A brave and timely book."—J.M.Coetzee"Here is a writer almost magically summoning up the world through words and ideas, in a new way, and so guiding the reader, lovingly, to receive the treasures and accept the pleasures of this book as naturally as breathing. Here is a book so measured in words and yet so exciting in ideas, a book that explains the world, even as it is explaining itself. This writer, Elaine Scarry, always leading us to consider justice, has given us a book that is beautiful and inspiring to such a degree that after truly reading it, the reader cannot help but be changed."—Jamaica Kincaid"Among a restorer's solvents, imagine one so marvelous that what it repaired, what it returned to sparkling freshness, was not some beautiful object, but our damaged perception of Beauty itself. Elaine Scarry's imagination works just this wonder: potent enough to dissolve our every grimy resentment, yet so delicate that in Beauty's renewed radiance we discern, long invisible, the subtle outline of an ethics."—D. A. Miller, Columbia University Globe and Mail - Laura Penny There is an aged shampoo commercial tattooed on one of my synapses: An implausibly shiny supermodel looks straight into the camera and purrs the indelibly irritating tagline -- "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." In her latest work, cultural critic Elaine Scarry makes a similar case, urging her fellow scholars in the humanities to stop being suspicious of beauty. Scarry fears that the humanities have become "beauty-blind," dismissing beauty as a diversion and distraction from more politically pressing issues such as justice and inequality. This is not to say that academia is, en masse, sticking up for the ugly. This is merely to note that beauty no longer enjoys an easy relationship with truth and goodness. Such absolutes are, as the kids say, sooo five minutes ago. Scarry's campaign for beauty as an absolute value is thus unabashedly retro, as are her classical sources: Plato, Homer, Dante, Kant and Proust.
Part 1On Beauty and Being Wrong1Part 2On Beauty and Being Fair55Notes125Acknowledgments133
