Jeremy Colangelo is the author of Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature and the editor of Joyce Writing Disability. He currently teaches at the University of Western Ontario, King's College, and is working on a book about literature and pain.
Jeremy Colangelo
Contributions
The Body Politic in Pain
Literary modernism has a close relationship with pain, though not an untroubled one. To make a very general comparison, pain is to literary criticism today what illness was to literature for Virginia Woolf, and likewise betrays an under-interrogated dualism. “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” Woolf writes, and so “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.”