This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.

The Culture of Pain

Literature & Fiction

Morris, David B.

History & Criticism

University of California Press

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness has changed in the postmodern era—roughly the period since World War II—as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, David B. Morris tells the fascinating story, or stories, of what goes into making the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique. Even as he decries the overuse and misuse of the term "postmodern," Morris shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism illuminate one another in late-twentieth-century culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease—an objectively verified disorder—from illness—a patient's subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, Morris says, can make no such clean distinction; instead, it demands a biocultural model, situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture. Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for investigating both biology and culture. In many ways Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age leads us to understand our experience of the world differently.

Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness has changed in the postmodern era―roughly the period since World War II―as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, David B. Morris tells the fascinating story, or stories, of what goes into making the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique. Even as he decries the overuse and misuse of the term "postmodern," Morris shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism illuminate one another in late-twentieth-century culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease―an objectively verified disorder―from illness―a patient's subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, Morris says, can make no such clean distinction; instead, it demands a biocultural model, situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture. Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for investigating both biology and culture. In many ways Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age leads us to understand our experience of the world differently.

Civil War Duet

History

Americas

David B Morris

Newton Brown in 1862 enlists at eighteen in the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In Civil War Duet, his 77-year-old great-grandson traces Newton's steps, braiding history and memoir in an original cross-century, trans-generational, coming-of-age narrative. Newton Brown's wartime letters and dispatches inspire a parallel meditation in which writer-scholar David Morris--living where Confederate monuments generate ongoing racial strife--reflects on growing up amid political assassinations and the legacy of semi-blind white-supremacist racism.

Susan Sontag once described illness as “the night-side of life.” When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into darkness and disarray, our routines are interrupted, our deepest beliefs shaken. The modern regime of hyper-logical biomedicine offers little solace when it comes to the effects of ill health on our inner lives. By exploring the role of desire in illness, Eros and Illness offers an alternative: an unconventional, deeply human exploration of what it means to live with, and live through, disease.
When we face down illness, something beyond biomedicine’s extremely valuable advances in treatment and prevention is sorely needed. Desire in its many guises plays a crucial part in illness, David Morris shows. Emotions, dreams, and stories―even romance and eroticism―shape our experiences as patients and as caregivers. Our perception of the world we enter through illness―including too often a world of pain―is shaped by desire.
Writing from his own heartbreaking experience as a caretaker for his wife, Morris relates how desire can worsen or, with care, mitigate the heavy weight of disease. He looks to myths, memoirs, paintings, performances, and narratives to understand how illness is intertwined with the things we value most dearly. Drawing on cultural resources from many centuries and media, Eros and Illness reaches out a hand to guide us through the long night of illness, showing us how to find productive desire where we expected only despair and defeat.

Eros and Illness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Harvard University Press

Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-century England (South Atlantic Modern Language Association Award Study)

The University Press of Kentucky

This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England, while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of Milton and of the Bible itself.Tracing the major varieties of religious poetry written throughout the century―by major figures and by their now vanished contemporaries―the author explains how later poets and critics made significant departures from the established norms. These changes in religious poetry thus become a valuable means of understanding the shift from a neoclassical to a Romantic theory of literature.

The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England

Religion & Spirituality

University Press of Kentucky

The story of one of Watson's many voyages bent on disrupting business as usual on the high seas.

Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Business & Money

Economics

Fulcrum+ Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morris, David B.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Morris, David B.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morris, David B.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Culture of Pain

Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Civil War Duet

Civil War Duet

Eros and Illness

Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-century England (South Atlantic Modern Language Association Award Study)

The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England

Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society