Beauty all too often masks power, say some, and beauty unfairly objectifies the body (usually female), say others. Scarry has noted that for a couple of decades now, professors have been avoiding any talk of beauty. Though her book is brief, the studied awkwardness of Scarry’s style makes it seem long and serves perhaps as a signal that these ruminations are for the happy few-which is too bad, because what she has to say is both interesting and original. Scarry (English/Harvard) delivered these thoughts on beauty as the Tanner Lectures of 1998 at Yale and then retired to a research institute to work them up for publication. An essay that aims to recover beauty as a serious topic for academic discourse and, more ambitiously, to reconnect beauty with truth and justice.
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