Margaret Ross talks to Elaine Scarry at The Paris Review:
Elaine Scarry lives in a pale pink house near the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A tall hedge runs along the front, rising to the second story and nearly engulfing the white picket gate through which one passes into Scarry’s garden. Flowers thrive in dense beds overlooked by crabapple trees and yews. Toward the back of the house, a curved wall of windows divides the garden from the garden room. Scarry’s longtime partner, the writer and scholar Philip Fisher, keeps a house nearby and they split their time between the two. Fisher does the cooking, and they eat dinner at his place. When it’s nice out they like to go for a drive.
Both teach a few blocks away in Harvard’s English department, where they’ve been on the faculty for more than thirty years. Scarry’s title is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value. Since The Body in Pain (1985), her iconic debut examining language in the context of torture and war, she has published eight books spanning literary criticism, moral and political philosophy, social theory, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, sometimes within the same volume.
more here.
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