Obvious but not obvious

[owl_of_minerva]

Here's a question for you all: name a text from your field/discipline that is ABSOLUTELY STANDARD and EVERYONE READS IT by at least their first or second year of grad school or so, such that you forget that most folks outside your field/discipline probably haven't read it (or haven't read more than, say, a brief excerpt or so). Do you find it

Comments

[pauldeman2pt0]

There is an entire canon that is absolutely standard [tm], but my field is so obscure that I also never expect anyone outside of it to be familiar with absolutely any of the aforementioned absolutely standard [tm] texts.

Are you just reading Elaine now???

I remember finding her for the first time in 2005, when I was researching for my M.A. thesis. She rocks. And I am actually about to start re-reading The Body in Pain shortly, because my paper for the 2008 MLA convention in San Fran is on "cruelty" in NAME OF POEM HERE (the panel is called "Name of Panel"), and in the poem all words derived from "cruel" are embedded in stanzas which describe, in painful detail, the infliction of physical violence / wounding.

Note: Edited to remove all references which might otherwise directly identify me. I just realized that this post is public. ;)

[owl_of_minerva]

Yep, publicarama.

I am just reading Elaine Scarry now! I remember you and gradx speaking of her work fondly, so I've had it on my theorysanta list twice, and thanks to the theory fairy received it a little while ago.

Part of the reason behind this post was that it seems that she's really, really well known, but with my philosophy blinkers on I didn't know about her work at all, and without the theorycrew I might never have really heard of her.

[pauldeman2pt0]

That's an extremely poor, watered-down understanding of her actual argument.

[pauldeman2pt0]

Yeah. In reality her writing style is refreshingly jargon-free, and her analysis of torture scenarios and of certain biblical passages was innovative and ground-breaking at the time of the book's writing / publication.

[pauldeman2pt0]

If you boil her work down to the simplest explanation possible, it's really an analysis of corporeality and language.