Pain Studies

de Lisa Olstein

"Pain Studies is a book-length lyric essay at the intersection of pain, perception, and language. Through the prism of migraine, Pain Studies episodically and idiosyncratically explores personal, cultural, medical, and literary histories of pain--how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it--and undertakes extended engagements with a range of sources including the trial testimony of Joan of Arc, the television show House, M.D., rhetorical attributes of pre-Socratic philosophy and mathematical proofs, essays by Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scar[r]y, and the perception-based work of artists Donald Judd and James Turrell. Written from and into its own urgencies of both form and content, it is in conversation with recent books by Maggie Nelson, Eula Biss, Sarah Manguso, and Leslie Jamison, among others." --