On February 6, Elaine Scarry came to Tufts to give the keynote Coit-Phelps speech at the Transformation Now! Symposium. Professor Scarry's talk was introduced by symposium organizer Sarah Corrigan.
Drawing from arguments in her book On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry spoke about the connections between aesthetic beauty and its connections to concepts of justice, healing, love, and kindness. Supporting her argument from contemporary social science studies, Romantic poets and greek philosophers, Scarry discussed how beauty presses us to a concern for justice, and how the two have been linked in our Western consciousness since classical times. She discussed the meaning of beauty in three ways-- first, she discussed how we conceptualize beauty, and how the language we use for it often dovetails with concepts of justice (especially in terms of symmetry, and "fairness"); second, she discussed the impact on the observer, and how that might inspire justice; and finally how the long-term effects of beauty may inspire our own powers of creation.
The talk concluded with a question-and- answer session followed by remarks from event organizer Sarah Corrigan. Photos from the event are available here.
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
